Solitary 5 Point 0
by starofoberon
Summary: Aaron Hotchner has been abducted. The Team's on the case, but in the end, it'll boil down to Hotch vs. a guy whose knowledge of profiling and mind games rivals his own. No 'ships, no slash. Co-written with my amazing beta Esperanta. COMPLETE
1. Justice Begins Here

A/N: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter One**

**Justice Starts Here**

The man who called himself Warden peered through a light spatter of rain on his windshield. Like his prey, he was a meticulous man, intelligent, observant, and orderly. Prepared for any contingency. No wild streak of impulsivity darkened his mental makeup.

But—also, like his prey—he could seem impulsive when his preparation met unparalleled opportunity and his powerful intellect recognized potential. Like his prey, he had the courage it took to break free of his own patterns and seize victory when it presented itself.

Like now, when the lawyer whom he'd been tracking so carefully, so meticulously, suddenly emerged from his garage into the light late-afternoon rain of a Friday in early May. He wore khakis, a light blue knit shirt, a plain navy nylon windbreaker, and a billed cap with the FBI insignia. He carried a tarpaulin and a folded nylon tent in his arms. Behind him, the garage door remained raised, rolled to its fullest height.

The lawyer was a cautious man, a meticulous man. The open door meant he would be back within just a few minutes. He was at home here, safe, in his quiet yard, on his quiet street, but he was also vigilant. Rigorously careful. He would not leave the door rolled up for more than a minute or two.

The man bent on destroying him did not hesitate for even an instant. Because he was always prepared, he didn't have to waste so much as a heartbeat regretting that he had not brought this item or that one, or to wish this had happened at a more convenient time. _Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation._

_It won't go down at the car wash in June after all._

He pulled to the curb, turned off the engine, and exited his surveillance vehicle. Walking with a relaxed and confident gait, the stride of a man who _belongs here_, who _fits in_, he made his way up the driveway of the adjoining house, which was almost a mirror image of his prey's own. It now stood vacant. Warden stepped across the narrow strip of grass that separated the two properties, and slipped into his prey's open garage.

**~ o ~**

_Incomprehensible pain._

_Christ, it's a heart attack, maybe a stroke, I can't die now. We just got settled. Jack's due here in an hour, shit, damn Dad and his fucking Type-A personality genes, I can't die early, too, I_ _need to get help_, _call 911_, and as he struggled with suddenly nerveless fingers to reach for his cell phone he tumbled forward, barely saving himself from falling smack on his face on the floor of the garage.

_That I haven't swept since we moved in, God, it's filthy…._

"Arms out," an unfamiliar voice said—and where the hell did that come from, anyway? Male. Middle-aged. Not so much authoritative as, as—

_Ow!_

_Oh, Jesus, worse than a stroke…. _

"Arms out," the voice repeated. "All the way out and away from your sides, or I'll turn up the power on my little Enforcer next time."

As the owner of the confident voice—and the Taser, or the Taser-like device, that was now pressed against the back of his neck—straddled his torso, he obediently extended his arms, arms that were sluggish, slow to respond. No, not a Taser. A cattle prod; he could tell by the contacts. _And he has named it. Probably the kind of guy who names his penis, too ..._

_Somebody has to see this. Some passing car. Some neighbor in search of the evening paper._

In a suspense novel, the hero would find something useful conveniently at his fingertips as he lay cruciform on his garage floor on a rainy spring evening. Real life was a bitch: His right hand touched nothing but dusty poured concrete. His left hand rested beside the right front wheel of his van. So—filthy, but uncluttered.

_A little clutter would be useful about now. A wrench, hammer, piece of pipe. Almost anything._

"It's like this," his assailant said as he swiftly and expertly searched Aaron, confiscating his cell phone and removing the battery, which he pitched across the garage floor. Calm. Matter of fact. "I'm not strong enough to knock you out and then wrestle you into my truck. So in order to move you from point A to point B, I'll have to harness your own kinetic and potential energy."

_Kinetic and potential energy? This guy sounds like Reid's evil twin…or maybe my junior high science teacher._

His attacker went on. "You have two motivators. The first is my device. If need be, I can turn it up so it immobilizes you completely—but then again, there I am trying to wrestle you into my truck. So my fallback position is this: If I have to immobilize you and drag you over to the truck, it will take more time, and you don't have time to spare. There is an explosive device set to go off in eleven minutes at 113 Aspenwood Circle. I believe that you're familiar with the neighborhood?"

"Yes," he whispered, horrified. _Can't show him fear._

The pain of the cattle prod was nothing to the pain that pierced his heart at the mention of Jessica Brooks's address, where his son at this moment was probably shoving toys and treats into his backpack, getting ready to head home to his father in her minivan.

"In eleven—well, ten, now, ten minutes the device will go off if I don't drive by and disarm it. I can do it remotely." The man who now straddled his back began rapidly, enthusiastically, to describe the precise makeup and placement of the device. Hotchner knew just enough about bombs to recognize that the guy knew his stuff. Worse, the man referred confidently to the layout of Jessica's property, the make and model of her minivan. He knew that stuff, too. "So do I have your undivided attention now?" he concluded.

"Yes." He wasn't even trying to keep the apprehension out of his voice anymore.

"So time is of the essence. When I bring the truck up the drive, I will come back in to get you. You will stand up and walk to the truck. You will not attempt to call out or otherwise attract attention. You will do this because if you disobey me, I will hurt you, and then we will run late and you will hurt your family. I may not be strong, but I am organized and I am determined."

_Wow. And you're profiling yourself for me_.

If Jess and Jack were not in danger, too, Aaron might actually have found that amusing in a twisted kind of way.

"All right, now put your hands behind you."

"What do you want?" Aaron asked.

The business end of the cattle prod slid along the back of his neck. "Don't make me shock you again; it'll just take time, and you don't have time. You may speak only when spoken to. Now shut up and put your hands behind you."

He complied with a sigh.

"Don't worry. I don't want to hurt any innocents," the man holding him down said. "The only reason I would do that would be to punish you, so—as long as you behave, your loved ones are safe."

Weirdly, Hotch believed him. That gave him courage.

Cords were wound around his wrists, then the man climbed off him and attached his hands to his ankles. The son of a bitch was hog-tying him! How in the hell was he supposed to get to the truck, wiggle?

"I'll be right back," the man said, and after a moment added smugly, "Don't go anywhere."

When he got to his feet and left the garage, Hotch twisted his head around and peered over his shoulder to steal his first look at his personal UNSUB: maybe five-eight, mid- to late forties, build thin but tough, fairly athletic. Light brown hair, possibly going gray, worn in untidy bangs practically to his eyebrows. Black-rimmed glasses. A terrific crop of muttonchop whiskers. Nothing even remotely familiar about him. He jogged through the evening mist in his jeans and corduroy shirt and climbed into an older model dark blue truck with a camper cap. The vehicle started with an unhealthy cough and moved into the driveway of the vacant house adjacent to his own.

No plate on the front bumper, which eliminated a lot of states right there—unless, of course, he'd removed the rear plates too, but then that would bring him to the attention of any police car that spotted him.

The man left the truck's engine running as he got out. Producing what indeed proved to be a long antique cattle prod from his right-hand back pocket, he beamed down at Hotchner. "Ready to come on board?"

"You don't need to do this," Aaron said.

The man crouched down. "Actually, I do," he said, conversationally. "And you were not given permission to speak." He adjusted something on the awkward-looking metal device, and bent down. "This will make movement difficult."

"No," Hotchner managed to gasp before the current hit him. His synapses scrambled, all of his muscles spasmed and contracted, and the pain made him dizzy and confused. He felt the cords falling away from his limbs, and then a calm voice directed him to stand up slowly and carefully.

He had been operating on the assumption that once the bonds were removed he might be able to resist his would-be captor, to drag him down and wrest the remote from his person, to tear off wildly for Jessica's house, but the most recent jolt of electricity had left him weak and uncoordinated. It was all he could do to drag himself upright, clinging to the side of his van.

"Now," the voice said, "to the truck, quietly and steadily. No quick movements. Your family's well-being is contingent on your obedience."

Hotchner doubted that he even had the capacity for quick movement at the moment. He could barely stand, and the world kept lurching around him. _Hurry_, he kept telling himself. _We're down to eight minutes and it's a five-minute drive. One foot in front of the other._

He would have given almost anything for a gun.

**~ o ~**

Warden leaned over. With his left hand he pulled the seatbelt across his wobbly prize and snapped it firmly into place, his right hand holding the prod tightly against the lawyer's side to discourage any attempt at resistance.

Once he had the man securely belted in, he laid the prod on the dash, within easy reach, then fished around under his seat for the little bag with the drug and the needle he'd previously stashed there. Carefully filling the hypodermic, he even tapped it for air bubbles, something he had never seen a real nurse do, though he had seen it often on TV. "Give me your left arm," he directed.

The lawyer looked at the needle warily. "You don't need to do that," he said, his voice low and controlled. "If you don't trust me, you can tie me up again, if you want."

"You don't listen very well, do you?" Warden sighed. "But you never did, did you? You don't have permission to talk. And you don't have permission to have opinions. About anything." He touched the cattle prod against his prisoner's ribs, eliciting a smothered cry and a return to enfeebled lack of coordination. "Much better," he said. He replaced the device on the dash and turned in his seat. "This will actually feel rather pleasant, or so I'm told," he said. He shoved the sleeve of the lawyer's nylon jacket upward and slid the needle into his unresisting arm.

The lawyer watched the injection with mournful eyes. "My family," he breathed. "Hurry."

Warden beamed. "There _is_ no device," he assured his captive. "Not unless you've pissed off someone who's a lot less civilized than I am." He rolled his eyes. "Bombing innocent people? Little old _moi?_ I mean, _really_." He watched the last of the liquid drain from the hypodermic, then withdrew it carefully.

The lawyer stared at him mutely with eyes already beginning to lose focus. "I know," Warden said with a light chortle. "And you thought you were such a great interrogator, could spot a lie-on-the-fly from fifty paces. I guess you can chalk this one up as a learning experience."

The lawyer started to wrestle weakly with his seatbelt.

"Do we really need another teachable moment here?" Warden asked, reaching out toward the shock device on the dashboard. The lawyer ignored him. Warden touched it lightly against the man's forearm. The prisoner jerked and shuddered and slid sideways with a faint protest.

Warden watched him with a mixture of disappointment and contempt. _You'd think an FBI goon would be sharper than that, tougher than that, but, hell, in the end a lawyer's just a lawyer._


	2. A Strong Man

A/N: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Two**

**A Strong Man**

He liked Karl Kraus, the Austrian journalist and aphorist. He had read two of his books while he was in prison. Sure, he was glib…but that was the nature of an aphorism, wasn't it?

_OK, what's that thing that Kraus says about how a weak man has doubts before he makes his decision and a strong man has them afterwards? He got that right, didn't he? Only I'm more scared silly…._

The man who called himself Warden piloted the pickup slowly along southbound suburban streets, keeping pace with vehicles around him, conscious always of his identity as a member of the pack, the identity that would prevent him from standing out.

After a few blocks he turned in at the parking lot of a big box electronics store. He cruised up and down the rows until he found a parking space between two larger vans. Maneuvering the pickup between the vans and sliding the transmission into Park, he released the catch on his seatbelt, sat back, and drew his first full breath since he left the lawyer's house.

A strong man.

_Ein starker Mann_, as Kraus would call him….

He reached behind him to the gym bag he had brought solely because he wanted to ingrain the habit, and not because he planned an abduction that day. He fished around among its contents until he found the blue hard-shelled container, much like a glasses case, only larger, nearly eight inches square. Inside this case he kept all of his fake facial hair. He had been collecting the stuff for years now, one of the few true indulgences in his carefully restricted life. Glaring at himself in his rear-view mirror, he peeled away the extravagant muttonchop whiskers, a perfect match for his hair, with a touch of gray for extra verisimilitude. He replaced them in the case beside the eyebrows he had chosen not to wear.

Once he had disposed of them and the enormous glasses, he took a comb from his pocket. Peering into the rear-view mirror, he parted his hair on the left and combed the idiotic-looking bangs back tidily. He observed his new look critically. Now, he looked more like a salesman or an accountant than a hirsute would-be terrorist.

He turned in his seat and pulled the cord out of his back pocket. He had never used anything like the tranquilizer before. He had intended to practice giving injections, to study the effect of the drug. To look it up, for God's sake, in the PDR or at least online. What if the guy died?

But the lawyer was still breathing. Snoring a little, actually, head thrown back, limp against the window.

_Right, but if he wakes up, who knows what kind of FBI tricks he has learned? I can't watch him and drive too._

Warden turned even further in his seat. As quickly and efficiently as he could, he relieved the lawyer of his nylon jacket and draped it over the back of the seat. Pity the jacket didn't have the FBI initials on it, too, like the billed cap that was still lying on the floor of the garage. Boy, what a great souvenir that would have been—but, no. It wasn't about souvenirs.

It was about _justice_.

He tied the man's hands together with the length of cord, then secured them to his upper legs. He draped the jacket back over his prisoner's lap and chest, covering his hands. Then he groped around behind the seat until he found a—well, it was meant as a pad for the seat of a chair, but it could serve as a pillow. He wedged it between the window and the lawyer's cheek. God, but he hated to touch the man! He could _smell_ the evil on him, but it had to be done.

He settled back in his seat, rebuckled his safety belt, and pushed the gearshift back into Drive.

**~ o ~**

Penelope did not immediately recognize the Caller ID, so she just said, "Garcia, Analysis."

"Agent Garcia," a vaguely familiar female voice said in a low and confidential tone, "It's Jess Brooks, Aaron Hotchner's sister-in-law."

"Oh, yes, of course—"

"This will probably sound silly, and I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation, but I'm here with Jack at Aaron's, and Aaron isn't here. They were going to camp in the back yard, Aaron and Jack were, but Aaron is just gone. The van is here and the garage door is—" Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Jack will be back from the kitchen in a second and I don't want to alarm him, but the van is here and the garage door is wide open and Aaron's cell phone is on the floor with no battery in it. And that just isn't like Aaron."

Garcia frowned and touched her earpiece as though a closer connection would give her more information. "How long ago was this?"

"I don't know. We just got here, and…oh, hi, sweetie!" Jess's tone shifted as she addressed her nephew. "What kind did you decide on? Banana-strawberry? Oh, _yum_! Can you go back and get me a blueberry? And a spoon of my very own? Awesome!" Again her voice dropped into confidentiality. "I was out in the yard, and the tent and tarp are on the picnic table and they're pretty wet, so my guess is it's been fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe even half an hour."

"We're on it," Garcia said, trying to keep the grimness and tension out of her own voice. "You just stay calm and take care of the little guy. I'll have an army there before you know it."

_And the Navy. And the Marines. And the fucking Power-Puff Girls. Everyone…._

**~ o ~**

"_What?_" Derek Morgan fairly shouted into the phone. "Oh, man, this can't be happening again! On my way—have the rest of the team meet me there. Garcia, hang with me a minute, OK?"

Abandoning his nearly full shopping cart, he pushed his way through the gridlocked evening checkout line, oblivious to the annoyed glares of the shoppers he jostled in passing. In a matter of moments he'd sprinted across the front of the store and was out the door, running to his car.

As he climbed into the SUV, he tossed his cell phone into the passenger seat, letting the Bluetooth link inside take over the call once the motor roared to life.

"Give me the address, Baby Girl. I know Hotch's new place isn't that far from his old one, but I haven't been out there yet." Actually, he knew, none of them had. If Hotch'd been private before Foyet, he was positively off the charts now. No house-warming this time, and rumor had it he'd bent the rules far enough to run a thorough background check on every adult male within three blocks before he'd committed to the closing. _Fool me once…._

"8723 Westbrook Heights, Arlington, sending to your GPS now," came Garcia's voice over the speaker. The dash map lit up, one red dot indicating his present location, another his destination, with a yellow line indicating the fastest route between the two points. "I texted the others, flash alert, responses from all but Ros—no, wait, he's on board now too." No teasing or lightheartedness in her tone this time—the Foyet nightmare was far too fresh in all of their memories.

Morgan threw the Pilot into reverse, nimbly avoiding a heavy Hispanic woman walking past, and peeled out of the parking lot. "And notify the—"

"—local P.D.," Garcia finished the sentence for him. "Done. They're putting out an APB on Hotch, and a BOLO for an older-model blue truck with a camper cap."

"Truck? Camper cap?"

"I haven't been sitting on my hands, Morgan; I'm getting direct video feed from the security company Hotch uses. He showed up on the passenger side of an older-model blue truck, correction, blue Ford F-150 with a gray camper cap."

"You are amazing, girl. I just thank God we've got you in our corner." He squeaked through the tail-end of a yellow light and gunned the SUV up the on-ramp to the Custis Parkway. Fortunately, Morgan lived in Falls Church, only about five miles from the quiet Arlington district that was now home for the second time to his boss.

Uncharacteristically, Garcia failed to even acknowledge his compliment._ Man, she's really in the zone. Put one of us in danger and she zeroes in on task like a sniper._

"Better send out a team of evidence techs, too, just to be on the safe side. I'll call you back as soon as we're all on scene and have something to report." He thumbed the "off" button and struggled to focus his attention on the road.

_Jesus Christ Almighty, this is crazy. This just can't be happening.  
><em>

**~ o ~**

The rain was falling again, splattering fat droplets with ever-increasing regularity against his windshield. Warden peered between them, searching for the logo of the apartment complex he had scouted out three weeks before. His idea then had been to use the parking lot as a staging area, because it was adjacent to the car wash he had identified as probably the best place to grab the lawyer, and because it had exits in three directions, onto three separate streets.

_Well, won't need the car wash now_ …

There it was, Dartmouth in the Cedars, a midmarket scattering of three-story buildings with cream-colored brick walls, lots of half-dead trees, and consistently bad line-of-sight between the units and their assigned Dumpsters, which he supposed was meant to be a good thing: no trash receptacles interfering with the residents' views.

He steered the pickup over to the worst-located grouping of Dumpsters in the bunch and parked. Climbing out, he walked to the rear, slipping a pair of inexpensive driving gloves onto his hands as he did so. With four quick movements he collapsed the fake camper cap that was constructed from six pieces of plastic-coated particle board.

He felt a tiny pang of regret as he disposed of the pieces. That particular bit of camouflage had taken him nearly a month to create—he was not much of an artsy-craftsy sort of guy—but he no longer needed it. Like the FBI billed cap, it was just one other thing that had to be jettisoned to ensure success of the main operation.

Three large potted palms lay on their sides in the truck bed. Warden lifted them upright and secured them in position, draping their pots with tarps and utility rags. He peeled the stick-on Michigan tags from the truck's rear, exposing the Pennsylvania plate. He balled up the peeled plastic tape and pitched it into the Dumpster with the discarded plate and the particle board.

Finally he groped around under the tarps and located magnetic signs advertising a fictional Altoona landscaping company. He affixed one to each of the truck's doors, then he stripped off first his gloves, and then the brown corduroy shirt, exposing a mottled pink tee shirt with the logo of an Atlantic City casino. A billed cap, the imaginary landscaper's logo embroidered on the front—needlecraft _was_ included in Warden's skillset; he had spent several satisfying evenings in his recliner in front of the TV with his sewing supplies beside him and the History Channel on the screen—and his new look was complete. There was another cap as well, one that matched his own. He carried it back to the cab.

The lawyer appeared not to have moved while he was occupied, but Warden did not intend to take any chances. Slipping his keys between his knuckles so that the metal tips protruded, he leaned in from the driver's side and poked at the lawyer's ribs a couple times, not hard, but firmly.

Nothing but a mechanical exhalation escaped him. He was still out cold. Warden arranged the second cap on the lawyer's head, tilted forward and to the side as if to facilitate napping. He admired his results for a few seconds, then turned around and buckled up.

He started up the engine again and exited the parking lot on another side, merging smoothly into northbound traffic this time.

**~ o ~**

Morgan, Rossi, and Reid stood in Aaron Hotchner's driveway, arms crossed and expressions grave as the high school girl across the street repeated her story.

"I saw, like, everything," she said, her eyes still wide with excitement. "I saw Mr. Hotchner come out of his garage with a big bunch of stuff, and the guy with the truck, he was driving down the street slow, like he's looking for an address or something, and then I guess that the guy in the truck waved at Mr. Hotchner, Mr. Hotchner nodded back, like saying 'Hi,' you know? Then Mr. Hotchner went around to his back yard, and the guy in the truck went over there," and she nodded nervously at the house next door, "where the Martinez family used to live, you know?

"And like a couple minutes later the guy with the truck pulled into the Martinezes' driveway and he and Mr. Hotchner got in the truck. And it looked to me like Mr. Hotchner was walking kinda wobbly, and I thought maybe he got sick, you know? And the guy who was driving the truck, he was smiling, he seemed real nice, like maybe he was helping him? Like maybe Mr. Hotchner got sick or injured and he was gonna run him over to Urgent Care or something?"

Morgan tried not to glare at the girl. "And you saw no weapons?"

"Huh? No! The guy from the truck, he had a 'do on him like a total dork, you know? But I didn't see any weapons at all. He just had, like, a stick, you know? I thought maybe he was picking stuff up on the grounds at the Martinez place."

"A stick?" Rossi echoed. "How did he hold it?"

The girl shrugged helplessly. "Like a stick, you know? Nothing special." She mimed holding something low in her right hand, near her hip, holding it more like a knife than like a stick or a hand gun. She held her hands ten inches apart. "It was about like _yea_, you know, just a plain old brown stick."

They thanked her and sent her back to the homework she had been doing on her family's screened-in porch.

"It just doesn't make sense," Rossi rumbled. "Aaron is an insanely high-risk target for one single UNSUB to take on. A senior federal agent, ex-SWAT, armed and observant—"

"Not armed," Morgan said. "I just got his combination. Both weapons are in his gun safe. And Garcia's techs have confirmed that nobody named Aaron Hotchner has visited any clinic or emergency room. No middle-aged white John Does, either."

Reid continued to watch the teenaged girl cross her parents' lawn. "Where are we on getting their security footage?" he said, nodding toward the girl's house.

Morgan glanced over his shoulder at the property in question. "Should have it soon. Husband isn't home, wife wasn't sure who to call or how to go about getting it."

Rossi refolded his arms. "OK, look, I'm the UNSUB. I know that Aaron's likely to be missed immediately—which he was—and a guarantee that the full force of the Bureau is gonna come down hard to get him back." He ran his fingers through his hair. "Could this guy do anything else wrong? But he pulls it off—" He shook his head. "And practically nobody knew we were home from Wisconsin yet, let alone that Hotch was planning to camp out with Jack tonight. And one guy took him out? One single guy?"

"Nobody saw a second person, let alone a second vehicle," Reid confirmed. "Prentiss and I have been all up and down the street." He nodded toward the curb. "He was parked over there, almost exactly where JJ's car is parked now.

"Everyone who remembers seeing it agrees it was a dark pickup with a light-colored camper cap. From there on, we start getting into 'eye-witless' territory. It was black, it was blue, it was dark blue. The cap was gray, it was silver, it was white. But everyone agrees it was only the one white guy, thin, in a brown shirt or brown short jacket and blue jeans. But he was tall, he was short, he was medium. His hair was brown or blond or gray. He had a beard or he had a beard and a mustache, or he had big bushy sideburns. Everyone agrees that he wore black-rimmed glasses."

"But with no weapon…do you think he made a threat, maybe to Jack, or the neighborhood, or—" Morgan asked. He didn't finish the thought. If someone had threatened the Team, it would have hit Hotch as hard as threatening his blood family.

"Wouldn't surprise me in the least," Rossi grumbled. "That would certainly give him an edge, trying to force compliance out of Aaron—"

"Got it!" JJ said, jogging out of the house with her iPad engaged. "Garcia's shooting it over to Kevin for further analysis, but here's the truck—" She turned the iPad and displayed a Ford F-150 of uncertain vintage, but probably from the mid-nineties. The camper cap was gray and silver. "And here's our UNSUB—" She flipped to a closeup of the truck showing its driver, a man of middle age wearing a corduroy shirt in a brown so light it was almost butterscotch. He wore heavy black-rimmed glasses and sported a luxuriant set of muttonchop whiskers.

As they watched the security camera footage, the man drove down the street twice, looking up and down the block. He checked his watch, consulted some papers that he picked up from beside him on the seat. He peered up into the sky as though wondering when the light rain would stop. At no time did the man demonstrate any particular interest in the Hotchner residence. If anything, he paid more attention to the vacant house next door. He seemed more like some random contractor preparing for a meeting with a potential customer than anything else.

"He's good," Morgan conceded. "Got to be a pro. Any luck yet getting the footage from the house next door?"

Jareau's shoulders lifted, then dropped. "We located the owner's representative, local lawyer, says the system is only intended to identify vandals, so a limited field of vision, and it only takes a few frames every minute or so. He's on his way down to unlock the place and give us access."

The four of them exchanged glances. If the victim had been someone else, if Aaron Hotchner had been there as part of their team, he would have had the attorney sweet-talked into giving them instant access half an hour ago.

Morgan's phone sounded. He glanced at the faceplate. "You're on speaker, Baby Girl."

"Kevin has worked his magic," Garcia said. "It's a 1997 Ford F-150, Michigan tags," and she read off the number. "Tags belonged to the late Ramona Blankenship of Adrian, Michigan, and supposed to be on a 2006 Ford F-250. Ms Blankenship died last winter, carbon monoxide poisoning. Her daughter in Cleveland inherited the truck—hang on, getting input from Sonia, we have every tech in the building on this, I swear—Ms Blankenship's daughter still owns the truck, although it has Ohio tags now. She says the Michigan plate is still in her garage. She just went outside and checked.

"Within eight minutes of the abduction, I have that vehicle showing on six southbound traffic cameras, then it drops out of sight. Anderson is working with Virginia State Police to blanket the areas…."

As she spoke, a black hybrid pulled into the adjacent driveway. An elderly man in a suit and tie emerged and waved uncertainly at them.

"FBI?" he called.

Four sets of creds came out, not that he could read them at that distance. "Steinvogel," he told them. "I'll pull the security cam footage for you."

Morgan turned moodily back toward the interior of the Hotchner garage, where Aaron's green soccer-dad minivan stood. He looked at the dusty floor and at the disturbances in the dust, disturbances that Bureau techs were photographing with several alternative light sources in hopes that more data would become visible.

He turned again to his teammates. "If this was a pro," he said, "then this is not a one-man operation. And you know what that means."

Reid nodded, always eager to answer any question, even one for which everyone already knew the answer. "A criminal enterprise," he replied. "An almost unlimited number of extra vehicles, even decoy vehicles. On the plus side, a criminal enterprise pays its participants, and paid participants can be turned. We just have to figure out which criminal enterprise Hotch has angered, and we're on our way to a solution." He glanced back and forth among his comrades. "And while it can be argued that the Bureau annoys every criminal enterprise, the BAU has a narrower window of criminal enterprises it interferes with. Most of our targets are individuals."

"Potentially something," Gus the evidence tech announced. Gus was constitutionally the kind of tech who doubted everything, who took nothing for granted. From Gus, "potentially" was practically "for damn sure."

"What have you got?" Rossi asked.

"Couple things. The cell phone was wiped but it still has some partials on it. Lab already has it. And this—" Gus displayed a tiny piece of metal on the palm of his gloved hand. "Battery for the cell, found it over there, practically under the left rear tire. Probably too small for a useful print, but you just never know. And then there's this."

Gus gestured at the dusty poured concrete floor, then called up some alternative-light-source images on his digital camera. "See here? Hotchner's a twelve-and-a-half, we've got his shoe prints all over here, but we've also got four full prints and seven partials of a work boot, size nine. It's a reasonable inference, given the way it appears both over and under Hotchner's prints, that it's from our guy's feet."

Every little bit helped. "Brand name of workboots?" Morgan asked. He could see no footprints at all with the naked eye, but he knew what kind of magic the techs could do with different types and angles of light.

Gus shrugged. "I shot it over to the database guys," he said. "Should have something in the next couple minutes."

The UNSUB might be good, might be a pro, but it was unlikely he would think to change his footwear. Nobody could think of everything.

Reid studied the floor of the garage. "The cell was there?" he murmured, indicating a spot on the floor. "And the battery there?" He squatted in the driveway and studied angles. "I think the UNSUB threw it," he said. "I don't see how it could have wound up there naturally." He squinted up into the high-intensity lights the crime scene techs had set up.

**~ o ~**

Hotchner's sense of hearing returned before anything else: the sound of windshield wipers on high speed, the thundering of rain on the roof of the vehicle as it bounced along a poorly maintained surface.

_Truck. Blue truck._ The whole lunatic situation came back to him, a piece at a time. The man with the glasses and whiskers, the man with the needle and the cattle prod. The man who had threatened to hurt Jack and Jess. Who had lied to him. Or so he said.

He opened his right eye. His vision was partially blocked by a pillow of some kind that had been inserted between his cheek and the window. Yellow floral something. Ahead was a two-lane rural road, barely visible as dusk descended; the truck's wipers were no match for this downpour.

He took stock carefully, slowly. His jacket was gone—no, it was arranged across the front of his body. His hands were restrained. He tried to move them; they seemed to be fastened to his thighs. He still had his hat. No, wait—he tried to roll his right eye upward and to the side without moving the rest of his face. Probably thanks to lingering effects of the sedative he'd been given, it was trickier than he'd thought it would be—nope, the bill of the cap was gray-blue, not the deep navy of his FBI cap.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," said that annoyingly prissy voice. "Let me just pull over, and I'll help you get back to sleep."

He thought that he had moved only slightly and very carefully. Apparently as he awakened, his breathing pattern had changed, and his captor had noticed it. But, no. How could he have heard it over the hammering of the rain, the frantic _chick-chock-chick_ of the wiper blades?

"You jerked when you woke up," the UNSUB informed him, as if he had read his mind.

_Control freak_, he reminded himself. _Freak, period. Said I couldn't talk without permission. No sense in trying to fake still being asleep. Might as well do this on his terms._

He turned to confront his captor and was surprised to see that the heavy glasses and extravagant sideburns were gone and his hair was combed differently, changing the general shape of his face. It wouldn't fool Garcia's facial recognition software, but it could fool human witnesses.

_He is clever, organized, educated. Remember this. Use this._

Aaron took a slow, steadying breath, then said, "May I speak?"

"Well, good for you!" his captor replied, almost jovially. "You remembered the rules! Certainly you may, at least for a moment."

Several questions were topmost in his mind. He wondered how many he would get away with asking. "Where is my son?" he asked.

"I have no idea," the UNSUB told him. "The last time I saw him was last weekend when you and he did the grocery shopping."

His words took Aaron's breath away, but he tried to keep his tone casual. "How long have you been following me?"

The UNSUB smirked. "Oh, off and on, for the better part of a year. Intensively, just since April." When Aaron looked at him the smirk broadened into a maddening Cheshire-Cat smugness. "I gather that spotting surveillance isn't your specialty, either."

Hotchner said nothing.

"Then the two of you went to the library and the Olive Garden with your sister-in-law and her current boyfriend. Bill Hammer, is it? Hummer? The one who just had the cast removed from his right wrist? He must be the Olive Garden fan, because when he isn't with you, you usually go to Red Lobster."

Aaron inhaled slowly and let air out. The guy's name was Hamrick, and Aaron had checked him out from here to next Thursday because he no longer trusted anyone. And, yeah: Bill hated Red Lobster so much that he always offered to pick up the tab if they would go to the Olive Garden instead.

_How could I possibly have missed this guy trailing around after me? _

"But he's all right?" he asked, still desperate for reassurance.

His captor seemed to snicker. "Little Jack? Unless in your absence he has Captain-Crunched himself into a sugar coma," he replied. "Or his auntie's boyfriend is as thuggish as he looks. But they are in no danger from me. You have a very sharp little boy there. Polite. Observant."

As a father, Aaron felt his heart swell to hear his son praised in those terms. As a prisoner, he felt a stab of fear at the _observant_ part of the assessment. Did his captor consider Jack some kind of danger?

And then there was the creepiness of _polite _and its implications.

_This bastard has spoken to my son?_

Before he could formulate a way to ask yet again about his son's well-being, his captor said, "I don't hurt innocents. Your son is safe with his Auntie Jessica, and they have probably long since discovered your absence and called for help. The cavalry has surely descended by now. Your Team, your merry little federal band of obsessives—ah, here we go…."

The truck bounced into a gravel driveway that Aaron had not even seen through the dark and the storm, and came to a halt in front of a squat white-washed building, probably a long-defunct gas station. While there were no longer any pumps on its small concrete apron, a rusty metal Pennzoil sign flapped noisily in the wind above a door whose glass panels had long since been replaced with plywood.

The man behind the wheel of the truck flicked on the overhead light. "Let me help you get back to sleep," he said again, his voice soothing.

"I don't want to go back to sleep," Aaron said, and he sounded petulant even to himself. He tugged uselessly on his bonds. "Who are you?" he asked. "What do you want with me?"

His abductor reached down between his legs for something under the seat. He withdrew a small case, which Hotchner belatedly recognized as the case where the drugs had been kept. "You may call me Warden," he said. "What do I want with you? Why, only for you to pay for your crimes." He filled the hypodermic and turned slightly in his bucket seat. "Hold still now." He jammed the needle into Aaron's arm and depressed the plunger. "And for now I need to you to shut up and go back to sleep. We have a long journey ahead of us."

Hotchner tried to fight the drug although he knew it was a pointless effort. Within just a few seconds the world had started going warm and gray and fuzzy. He tried to say something, he wasn't sure what, and he drifted back into unconsciousness.


	3. Rising Only to Fall

A/N: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Three **

**Rising Only to Fall**

Derek Morgan stood gloomily under the overhang of Aaron Hotchner's garage, watching the rain destroy any little bit of trace evidence that they might have missed on the driveway and in the grass. He was tired of one lead after another turning to crap.

The identifiable friction ridges on the phone and the battery were Hotch's. There were a few partials so small that they were impossible to match to any individual. They could even be Hotch's, too, for all the lab analysts could say.

The work boot lead seemed to have petered out, too. That style boot was manufactured by the tens of thousands in the Philippines and sold in mass quantities under four different brand names in discount houses all across the US and Mexico. The most common sizes were 9, 9½, and 10. The treads had been pretty worn; they were not a recent purchase. Trying to pinpoint a buyer was an impossible task without more information.

Every time he glanced to his left, he saw the driveway of the adjacent house, the vacant house that had once belonged to the Martinez family. In his mind's eye he saw that freaking blue truck parked there, and his mind then helpfully supplied a photo from the security camera on that property: the UNSUB, all goofy bangs, geek glasses, and muttonchop sideburns, flicking his fingers against a hypodermic needle. The look on Aaron Hotchner's face had been one of pure apprehension.

_They wanted him alive, whoever they were._

_Did he recognize this man? Does he know who took him? What do they want with him?_

His phone sounded. He glanced at the faceplate, and said "Ma'am," to Section Chief Erin Strauss.

"I won't keep you, Agent Morgan," she said briskly. "I know you need to keep this line open. I just needed to say, for the record, that in Agent Hotchner's absence you are Unit Chief in every sense of the word. You already knew that, of course, and you've been acting in that role, but this makes it official."

"Thank you, ma'am," he replied without enthusiasm.

"And something else you need to hear from me even though you already know it, just to dot all the I's and cross all the T's—whatever you need from Bureau resources, it's yours. Keep me in the loop, Agent Morgan. We need to bring Agent Hotchner home."

He thanked her and closed off the call.

Almost immediately his phone buzzed again. He thumbed it on and said, "Give me some good news, Garcia."

"You ask and I deliver," the tech analyst replied. "Putting the search out to the public is paying off. A woman who lives at Dartmouth in the Cedars, that's an apartment complex south of—"

"I know it," Morgan interrupted.

"Anyway she says that she saw a blue truck with a silver camper cap and Michigan plates enter their parking lot at around 4:15, 4:20. She noticed it because her niece—this is significant—her niece has a truck a lot like that one and is having marital troubles. She took a careful look, because she was hoping that her niece had come to her senses and left the bastard, although she didn't phrase it quite that way. When she saw the plate it was the wrong color. It looked like her grandson's plate. He lives in Michigan."

For the first time in hours, Morgan felt like there was something to inhale over. "Then we have to—"

"Done, my love. Virginia staties are sending an unmarked to drive through the parking lot as we speak." She sighed. "And they're responding already. No such truck parked there. Want the area closed off?"

"And every techie we've got," Morgan growled. "Every damn one. Have the LEOs cordon the place off to preserve whatever's left of the scene. Get Anderson to liaise with their security people, see what we can get off their cameras."

"As we speak, sir."

**~ o ~**

Everything went to hell when he pulled into the field behind a farmhouse located a few miles east of Gettysburg. To begin with, before the rain abated here, it had evidently reached torrential proportions. The field that separated him from his own vehicle, a late model sedan, had turned to a sea of muck. There was no way he could safely drive across it. He and his uncooperative captive would have to traverse it on foot.

He shut off the ignition and looked to his right, to the bound man showing signs of returning consciousness beside him. Warden had refrained from blindfolding him for most of this portion of the drive. The highway here was a busy one; it would not do for bored anklebiters staring glumly out the windows of passing minivans to call to their parents, _Look,_ _Mommy_, _that man gots a blindfold on!_

For all he knew, the whole world was looking for his truck, although he hoped that the old blue truck they sought was one with Michigan plates and a camper cap, not Pennsylvania plates and a trio of potted palms in the truckbed. He resolutely refused to listen to any of the news channels. They would just remind him of his fugitive status, and before he knew it, he would be thinking like a fugitive and acting like a fugitive. The presence of a blindfolded and bound passenger would have nailed his identity.

He nudged his passenger, who uttered a faint groan.

Definitely regaining consciousness.

The advantage to an alert captive was that Warden would not have to wrangle damn near two hundred pounds of dead weight across twenty meters of soupy, sloppy weeds.

The disadvantage was that an alert captive—bigger and heavier than Warden, and trained, according to Warden's research, in all manner of offensive and defensive martial arts; a man long accustomed to combat situations—could easily launch a successful attack. The captive's "escape" at that sort of juncture would be the very least of Warden's worries.

Warden collected his gym bag from the storage area behind the seats. From a small zipper container, he withdrew a heavy elastic bandage and a knife. He cut a three-foot length from the bandage and wound it around his prisoner's head twice, tying it at the back. Then he took the rest of it and wrapped it around the lawyer's torso, securing his upper arms tightly to his body. That would make an attack more difficult, but there was no telling what a desperate man might do in his own defense. He would have to walk, however, so Warden released the catch on the man's seat belt.

_Ah, but now…. _

Warden believed himself to be a kind man, a just man. He had never derived any pleasure from inflicting pain on his fellow man. On the contrary, because he had himself suffered so much, he tended to identify with the underdog, the victim. Even his captive.

To a point. There were other people, beloved other people, to consider.

Realizing what he must do, he withdrew the Enforcer from its charger and reversed it in his hands. Gripping his passenger's left forearm to keep it motionless, he raised the butt-end of the Enforcer and brought it down sharply like a baton across the lawyer's knuckles. "That's for Jason," he announced as his captive wheezed in pain from behind clenched teeth.

_Be courageous. When you hesitate, you do nobody any favors, not even your prisoner._

"That's for Ellie," he barked as he struck a second time. "That's for Diana," he concluded, his last blow across already reddened and swelling fingers eliciting a strangled scream.

Yes, it was awful. He was fully aware that fingers are a huge tangled mass of nerve endings, among the most sensitive areas of the body. For a few minutes, the pain would prevent his prisoner from doing anything useful with his hands. Even now he hunched over, his dead-white face a rictus of agony. Warden opened his knife and sliced through the cord attaching the man's hands to his thighs.

He collected everything he had in the front—the charger, the drug case, his prisoner's nylon jacket, everything he had brought and had touched—then climbed out of the truck, the gym bag slung across his right shoulder, the Enforcer in his left hand. He slammed his own door and paused to attach the carrying cord to the Enforcer and slip it around his wrist. He could not risk dropping it just because his hands were wet. He sloshed around the vehicle to the passenger door, which he flung open, then seized the lawyer by his shirt collar and dragged him from his seat. The prisoner staggered, hunching his shoulders against the rain that drizzled down on the both of them.

"Walk," Warden shouted. Maintaining a firm grip on the lawyer's knit golf shirt and pressing the Enforcer meaningfully against the back of his neck, he shoved him in the appropriate direction. "When we get to the car, climb in."

Being a treacherous sonofabitch, of course, the lawyer stopped, doubled over, and spun, with one sweeping motion knocking the Enforcer out of Warden's fingers and head-butting him. The head-butt went wild, glancing off Warden's ribs instead of knocking the breath out of him.

Quivering with outrage, Warden danced backward two paces and fumbled the Enforcer back into his grasp. "Don't try that again," he growled at the lawyer, hoping that he was exactly the kind of idiot whose response would be to do exactly that.

_And thank God I attached the strap to it…._

Alas, the lawyer did not rise to the bait. Instead he also backed up two paces, bending over again and trying to reach the elastic bandage that covered his eyes. Envisioning years of his planning and effort coming to naught because of a scuffle in a muddy field, Warden lunged forward, not even trying to calculate resistance patterns, and jabbed the Enforcer into the lawyer's shoulder.

The lawyer howled, sank to his knees, and then toppled forward and sideways into the soup of weeds and muddy water.

Warden peered at the Enforcer. At some point, probably when he used the thing like a baton, he had pushed the control to its maximum power.

"I don't enjoy hurting you," Warden shouted, his anger just barely contained, "but I by God will not tolerate that kind of defiance." While the lawyer still huddled, panting, in the weeds, Warden rescued his prisoner's landscaper-company billed cap and shoved it into one back pocket of his jeans. Then he took his last pre-cut piece of cord from his other pocket. Moving cautiously, his eyes focused on his captive, he approachedthe lawyer from behind and wrapped the cord around his neck twice, then wrapped it around his own left hand and yanked, hard. "Get up," he commanded. "Don't make me shock you again."

The lawyer began to struggle to his feet.

"That way. Walk," Warden said when the man was fully upright, and shoved the man in the right direction. He let the Enforcer dangle from his wrist and reached into his pocket for his remote key, which he triggered as an auditory cue.

The lawyer jerked at the familiar chirping sound and seemed to correct his path more nearly toward the car. When he arrived at his objective, his damaged fingers fumbled along the side of the vehicle until he located the door handle. He wrestled the door open, then stood there beside it for a moment, as though recognizing the extent to which he was participating in his own captivity. Suddenly his shoulders slumped. He turned his body slightly, lowered his buttocks to the seat, and drew his long legs, one by one, into the foot well.

He then doubled over, breathing heavily. Warden leaned over him, wondering how to get him buckled in without risking some more FBI kung-fu magic. As he did so, he recognized the lawyer's breathing pattern. He recognized the signs of someone trying not to engage his vocal cords, someone trying not to cry out.

Warden had breathed exactly that way sometimes after his father, Waldo, beat him. When the lawyer straightened up, when he squared his shoulders and set his jaw, Warden recognized that, too. Even as a child he had been determined not to let Waldo see his pain and fury. Showing his misery had always sent his father into a black humor, as though the mere suggestion that he might be responsible for his son's suffering outraged him. Waldo had believed, of course, like most evil men, that he was a good man; a just man.

Warden was not sure how he felt about the parallels he was seeing. He was no Waldo—he knew that for a fact—but it was difficult to see the lawyer engaging in the same denial that he had learned as a child.

Still standing in the light rain, Warden pressed the Enforcer against the lawyer's jaw line just to buy himself some time while he figured out how to manage this awkward point.

"May I speak?" the lawyer rasped.

Warden thought this was probably a bad idea, but he was too curious to refuse. "Briefly," he said.

The lawyer's tongue darted out quickly as though moistening his lips, although his face and hair were still dripping wet. "Don't use that." His tone sounded calm and reasonable, rather than pleading.

"What, my Enforcer? You don't want me to use my best, my least damaging weapon?"

The lawyer's tone remained steady although he sounded weary and played out. "Please don't. I won't resist you. To the best of my ability I'll do whatever you tell me to do."

_He thinks he's negotiating! He thinks that somehow we can exist on the same plane of justice and integrity!_ He stood there for a few seconds, waiting for the deal-breaker, the inevitable _I give you my word. I promise_. He knew first-hand how much—rather, how _little_—Aaron Hotchner's promises were worth.

But the lawyer said nothing further. No pleading, no further bargaining, and no assurances, false or otherwise. He just sat there, soaked to the skin with filthy water, with random bits of weed sticking to him, with the sodden elastic bandage about his upper arms losing more elasticity by the second and slowly sliding down to his elbows. He faced forward silently with his jaw set and his lips in a tight line. So: Believe him? Or don't believe him? Avoid the risk of an escape attempt, or give his prisoner his first chance to demonstrate obedience? It was almost a pity that he was blindfolded; Warden felt he could have read the man's attitude better if he had seen his eyes.

_Those unforgettable cold, fucking arrogant eyes…._

"Ah," he said. "Like the way you obeyed me back there? When you turned on me?"

Smartass lawyer didn't have an answer to that one. He just lowered his head and sat there.

"_To the best of my ability_ is nothing but weasel words," Warden said. "What if you fail? What if _the best of your ability_ just doesn't cut it?"

A long pause, then the lawyer replied, his voice still steady, "Then I doubt that torturing me will improve my performance."

Warden tapped the lawyer's shoulder. "False logic," he said. "Try to think of it less as an effort to improve your performance than a punishment for failure to do as you were told."

The lawyer nodded slightly and said _OK_ so softly that Warden all but had to read his lips to catch his reply.

Stowing the Enforcer in the back pocket where the cord had been, he yanked the seat belt down from its raised position and pressed the metal tab against the lawyer's bound and battered hands. "Buckle yourself in," he said.

The lawyer fumbled with the tab so long that he had to let it wind itself back up again so he had enough slack to reach the latch, and then it took him several groping tries to engage the lock. When he at last succeeded in his assigned task, he turned and faced forward. His hands were on his lap, his jaw was set and his features were stony. No, _composed_.

In spite of the random droplets still drizzling down occasionally on his billed cap, Warden continued to stand by the open door to the car, observing his captive, then he unwrapped the cord that encircled the lawyer's throat from around his hand and wound it instead around the headrest and knotted it tightly in back.

"There," he said. "That'll help you keep your head, like your lap tray, in the upright position."

Warden straightened up and slammed the passenger door. He walked around the front of the car, his own car, his personal 2010 Kia, flung the gym bag into the back seat, then climbed in on the driver's side. Rather than starting the car right away, however, he turned in his seat and considered his prisoner.

The lawyer sat still except for an occasional twitch of his shoulders or his biceps. Warden thought that possibly the twitches were artifacts from the shocks he had endured from the cattle prod, but he didn't know for sure. He would have to check it online as soon as he had wireless access again.

Four hours ago Warden had just been a cautious, meticulous geek with a free weekend, doing a quick surveillance, one of numerous rehearsals meant to be preparatory to abducting the lawyer.

_In June. At the car wash. _

And now look at him: He was the proud owner of a faithless sleazeball of a lawyer, bound and blindfolded, completely at his, Warden's, mercy. He had even beaten a man bigger, younger, more fit, and better trained than he was—beaten him at his own game.

Actually, Warden was feeling pretty pleased with himself. He did not experience that emotion often. He intended to enjoy it insofar as it didn't interfere with the task at hand. He turned a bit further to his right. "So," he said conversationally. "You say you won't try to escape."

The lawyer's head rose and his nostrils flared slightly. "I won't resist you," he repeated, still in that calm, gravelly voice. "If you tell me to do something, I'll do it to the best of my ability. If I see an opportunity to escape, I can't promise you that I won't try to take it."

Warden arched an eyebrow—a gesture lost on his captive, of course—and smiled. "And you're telling me that? You're admitting that?"

His prisoner still faced forward. "Would you prefer that I lie?" he murmured.

Warden thought about that. Although he was often the smartest guy in the room, he was accustomed to working around other very intelligent people, to the kind of intellect that would cut through the crap of everyday discourse. And he had known going into this that his prey was himself an exceptionally intelligent man. What surprised him, what threw him off his game, was that the lawyer neither cringed nor cursed. He had shown fear and anger at the outset, but now he seemed if not serene, at least accepting. They probably taught self-control at Quantico, but this was a voluntary silence. Thoughtful. _Dignified_. He was pretty sure the FBI didn't teach that.

"You stole five years of my life," Warden informed him. "And now I intend to take five years of yours. Are you afraid?" 

The lawyer turned blindly toward him. Not all the way: If the blindfold were missing, he would have been staring somewhere over the steering wheel. "Does it matter?" he asked, his face still devoid of expression.

"_Should_ it matter?" Warden replied. _Right, getting all Socratic with your prisoner, way to go, fella …_

The lawyer rolled his shoulders and stiffened his spine for a moment as though relieving pressure on strained back muscles. He shivered slightly, almost certainly from the cold, and not from fear. "Would you prefer for me to be afraid?" he asked. "Would you _like_ for me to be afraid?"

Interesting way to express it, giving no contextual clues as to whether he actually did feel any fear. By this point his other prisoner, his other lawyer, who had suffered far less than this man, had been quivering so hard in terror that he could barely speak, and had been babbling frantically, trying to bargain with him.

This one just sounded like a lawyer engaged in preliminary negotiations.

_I have allowed him to take control. I have handed over the power to him by having a conversation with him._

"We're done," Warden said sharply. "You no longer have permission to speak."

The lawyer nodded his understanding and faced forward again.

Warden shoved his key into the ignition and turned it harder than he needed to.

**~ o ~**

Emily Prentiss knelt among a sea of storage boxes in Aaron Hotchner's spare bedroom, feeling like a creep. Going through a dead person's things, constructing a profile of a victim, was icky enough. It was worse when you were rummaging through the secrets of someone who was—or so they all hoped—still out there, still alive. When it was someone you knew, someone you cared about, well, that was a whole 'nother dimension of creepy.

It had to be done, however, on the admittedly unlikely chance that this UNSUB, who had no official FBI name yet other than "Furface," which was what Rossi called him, came not from the activities of the BAU, but from Hotch's personal life or his past before the Bureau.

So far, other than what had to be almost every drawing that Jack had ever made, a wedding album, and a shoebox full of love letters from Haley when they were at separate universities, all she had to show for her efforts was that Haley's father had taken a dislike to Aaron and had initially objected to the marriage. He had come around later, obviously; she remembered him from Jack's christening. He thought the world of his son-in-law. That one was a dead end, anyway.

"Some of his law school colleagues didn't care for Aaron," Rossi said from his own pile of Hotchner memorabilia near the open louvered closet doors. "A little late and a little drastic to abduct him because back in—" He turned something over and checked the date. "In 'eighty-seven he was, and I quote, 'an arrogant asshole.'"

Prentiss stared. "Why on earth would he keep something like that?"

Rossi gave one of his gentle smiles. "I've known him for almost twenty years, probably know him better than anyone other than Haley ever did, and he's still something of a closed book to me. He's always held a lot of himself back." He sat back on his heels and chewed his lower lip. "I have no proof on this, but I have reason to suspect that he confided things to Gideon that he later regretted telling him. Gideon could be…pretty manipulative."

Prentiss nodded agreement, then an unpleasant thought hit her. "Should we consider Jason a suspect?"

Rossi grimaced. "Even though I know you're kidding—or I hope you're kidding, anyway—let's keep him on the list, way, way down at the bottom, but on there, just in case."

Emily chewed her own lip in dismay. They had to be pretty damn desperate if they were counting Jason Gideon.

Rossi's phone sounded, and he said into it, "Whatcha got?" After a few seconds of listening, he said, "So far we got nothing here. We have a few more boxes to go through, then we're done. Where do you want us to go from here?"

When he signed off, he sighed deeply. "The camper cap was a phony. They found it in pieces in a Dumpster, along with the Michigan plate and the brown corduroy shirt. They're shipping everything to the labs, hoping for fingerprints, maybe even a DNA profile from the underarms on the shirt."

"Nothing impulsive about this at all, was there?" she whispered.

Rossi shook his head. "This isn't good. We need a break, and we need it now." He pitched the _arrogant asshole _greetingcard into the depths of the closet and sat back on his heels. "Soon as we're done here, Morgan wants us back at the office, to look at Reid's timeline, maybe give it some fresh eyes."

Prentiss nodded.

_I hope somebody has some new ideas, 'cause I'm completely at a loss here._

_Where the hell are you, Hotch?_


	4. A First Analysis

A/N: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Four **

**A First Analysis**

Warden, suddenly solicitous, had toweled Aaron's hair dry. He had then tucked Aaron's jacket around his upper body like a blanket and was running the heat in the sedan on High.

This conspired, along with the pain and stress that had sapped his energy, to tempt Hotchner to fall asleep. Even the symphony playing on Warden's expensive sound system acted as a lullaby of sorts, making it even harder to concentrate on the confusing jumble of facts that he had managed to acquire so far.

First, the potentially most telling—and most troubling—was the whole _That's for Jason, that's for Elle_ thing. Try as he might, Aaron kept associating the names with Jason Gideon and Elle Greenaway. At the moment, he saw no reasonable alternative to that interpretation, although why Warden would want to beat him on his hands while invoking those names was another question, and one for which he had no answer. Maybe when his head had cleared a little more it would make more sense. And who the hell was Diana?

Warden might be highly organized, but he seemed to be playing some parts of this abduction by ear. He had tied and re-tied Hotchner three different ways now, the most recent after he loosened some cords so Aaron could sit sideways, his feet on the gravel shoulder of the road, and urinate blindly out into the weeds just beyond the shoulder. Warden had removed the elastic bandage that encircled his body, leaving his bound hands free to move up and down. As a consequence, Aaron now had the ability to scratch his chin and to fiddle with the way the seat belt rested against his torso.

He could, if he so chose, reach up and peel the blindfold off his head, and that sometimes tempted him. However, he decided it was unlikely he would see anything useful in whatever brief window of time elapsed between his raising the blindfold and Warden jamming the fucking Enforcer into his ribs. He wanted no part of the Enforcer. He knew he had a reputation for stoicism among his team members, yet there was actually a fairly short list of things he would _not_ do to avoid severe pain—and thanks to the Enforcer, the list was getting shorter by the minute.

At least he had a general sense of the passage of time now. In some ways, Aaron Hotchner's musical tastes were fairly unsophisticated, but he recognized classical orchestral music when he heard it. By his interpretation, classical orchestral music that seemed to go on forever was probably a symphony. His father had owned a collection of symphonies on vinyl that he never seemed to play (otherwise Aaron might have recognized whatever it was that Warden was playing, other than that he was fairly sure he had heard some of it in a cartoon a long time ago). Each album seemed to contain one symphony. Therefore it was reasonable to assume that most symphonies ran somewhere around an hour.

One symphony had concluded. Not long ago, Aaron had heard Warden fiddling with CD covers and another symphony had started.

_So … a little more than an hour since the nightmare in the rain, when for a few seconds he had been so close to escape._

Warden: Older than he had appeared when Aaron first got a look at him. Deep lines between his eyes had been hidden by the dark rims of the glasses. His eyes were mournful and his hair had more gray in it than had initially been obvious. Wrinkles on his neck, too. His voice was not so much annoyingly prissy as it was annoyingly precise, each word enunciated with clarity and an absence of regional accent.

Warden was, Aaron suspected, a Midwestern school teacher. Warden questioned, exhorted, explained, and challenged. If Hotchner had to specify the level, he would say high school or community college—even a combination, a high school teacher who taught evening courses on the college level. His trace of arrogance hinted at a man defensive because he had never achieved an early goal of professorship at a four-year institution. He loved his profession, though, and his subject matter.

Aaron was still undecided about the subject matter. He leaned toward math and the hard sciences—he envisioned him teaching high school physics—but something about the man's style of argumentation and his enthusiasm about his research kept philosophy and history in the queue of potential specialties.

And I caused him to lose five years of his life, he recalled. So he thinks that he's going to take five years of mine.

The obvious interpretation was that Aaron and the BAU had been responsible for Warden's conviction for some crime. One obvious drawback to that interpretation was that Aaron had a spectacular memory for faces and he could not recall ever seeing Warden before. Another was that the vast preponderance of crimes the BAU was involved with carried sentences way in excess of twenty years. Hotchner was hard-pressed to think of anyone in whose conviction he had been involved who was not doing, at minimum, fifteen-to-life.

Five years previously, Hotch realized, both Jason Gideon and Elle Greenaway had been part of the BAU. Both of them had made mistakes, big ones. Both of them could be callous, almost cruel, to individuals whom they believed to be their UNSUB. Most of the time they were right. Occasionally, they were wrong. Aaron had spent many stressful hours cleaning up after them, apologizing for emotional brutality inflicted on people who had turned out to be victims, not predators. Covering to Strauss for their lapses in judgment. In a couple cases, sucking it up and taking the responsibility—and the discipline—for those lapses.

So…was this yet another instance in which he was taking the fall for something that Jason or Elle had done? Was that what Warden was? Some small fish caught in their net while they were in pursuit of a greater target? That might explain why he didn't recognize Warden's face, but then again, why hold him responsible, and not Greenaway or Gideon?

_Or maybe he already has taken them._

Hotchner frantically tried to remember the last time he had heard from the former profilers, and realized with dismay that it had been years since he had spoken to either. Reid had run into Elle at a crafts fair somewhere, but that had been at least a year ago.

His fingers still ached and throbbed from the blows. There had been powerful outrage behind those assaults, and Warden had definitely said _That's for Jason_ and _That's for Elle_—implying that Hotch was being punished for injuries _he_ had done to them.

_Me? Really?_

The symphony seemed to feature ponderous strings in a minor key with occasional random bursts of a threatening percussion. _Music to be abducted by_.

He turned his head in the general direction of the man driving the sedan. "May I speak?" he asked.

"Briefly," came the response.

There was no tactful way to phrase it. "Are you sure you have the right guy?"

Warden gave a short, bitter laugh. "Undoubtedly. Your name used to be Aaron Hotchner."

_Used to be_. That wasn't encouraging.

"Really," Aaron said, more as a comment than as a question. "And what is it now?"

"At present, you have no name," the self-styled Warden informed him. "You're just a lawyer. When we arrive at our destination you will receive your name."

_'Just a lawyer.' Then this _has_ to do with something that happened while I was at DoJ._

"Is it—is it permissible to ask what that name will be?"

A chuckle. "Be my guest. Ask away."

Symphonic strings gave way to thundering horns and—_shit, whatever those things are that aren't horns. Woodwinds, yeah._ He drew a cautious breath. "All right, then: What will my name be when I—when we get to our destination?"

Another chuckle. "I didn't tell you that I would answer."

The music shifted again, ominous and insistent. "That's true," he conceded. "You just gave me permission to ask."

_I really hate this music, it's like the soundtrack for an execution…._

"But there's no secret to it," Warden continued. "Your name will be Prisoner."

"Mm," Hotch sighed, knowing even as he did so that he might be asking for trouble. "Catchy."

Warden gave an unexpectedly loud, barking laugh. "Perhaps a little later in your confinement you can move up to something a bit more euphonious."

Rather than respond to that bit of intelligence, Hotchner fell silent. _Confinement. He thinks that he's locking me up for five years?_ The whole orchestra seemed to be sighing, moaning, thrashing about over something.

On some levels, the seemingly reasonable aspects of Warden's personality—little flashes of humor, for instance, and his style of argumentation—troubled Aaron more deeply than almost anything else. They indicated a balance, a sense of perspective that, however skewed from the norm, was less likely to make mistakes based on obsessions.

Abruptly the music halted. When it began again, the strings, alone, played the closest thing to an identifiable melody so far. It was, he decided, either the most beautiful or the saddest song he had heard in a long time. No doubt because the events of the past few hours had stressed him to the point of extreme emotional vulnerability, he felt his chest tightening up, sensed tears welling up behind his blindfold.

He gnawed his lip and hoped for an early return to cartoon themes.

**~ o ~**

"Yes, love?" Garcia said into her stalk mike to Rossi, but there was a dangerous edge in her voice. Only someone cheerfully clueless about a lot of what she did could be so confident that she could achieve the impossible. Someone like David Rossi, who seemed to think his chops at _Grand Theft Auto_ made him some kind of techie genius.

_I feel like frickin' Dr. McCoy: I'm a tech analyst, not a clairvoyant…._

"Any luck with the truck?" Rossi asked, his voice full of confidence.

She was a professional. She held tight to her temper.

"That depends on your definition of luck," she replied. "I've definitely located our UNSUB at 2:20 this afternoon buying a Big Mac, an apple pie, and a medium Coke in Alexandria."

"I know about that, JJ was over there. Any prints he might have left are probably long gone– "

"At least we know he isn't a vegetarian and he probably isn't diabetic, sir." She tried to keep her tone civil, but it was hard. Lord, it was hard.

"We need to identify this truck, Garcia!"

"I'm working on it," she all but snarled. "Sir, do you have any idea how many 1997 Ford F-150 trucks there are still running just in Metro DC? And how many of them are blue? I can't even sort them by male owners; this guy could be driving his girlfriend's truck. Or his aunt's. Or his mother's. Or his daughter's." She gestured broadly at her screens, not that Rossi could see her doing it. "All we really know about this truck is that it doesn't have a camper cap and it has no visible bumper stickers. We can't even be sure about inspection stickers, given the angles of the cameras."

"What do you need from me?"

Obviously Rossi was trying to be helpful, so she tried to be polite. "I need search parameters that are meaningful, sir. Even if I could eliminate all the vegetarians and the diabetics, we have no evidence that he lives in or around the District."

"What kind of parameter are you looking for?"

"Oh, 'people who hate Hotch enough to kidnap him' could narrow it down quite a bit, sir."

"People he's convicted?"

"Been there, done that, sir. I even went back over his convictions with the DoJ. I found only four people on that list—and it's a long, long list; he's been a busy guy—who own a 1997 F-150. Two are still in prison, one in California, the other in North Carolina. One lives in Oregon, he's past seventy and he's on dialysis. The fourth lives in Kentucky. The KBI assures us he's at home, they have him under surveillance, and the truck is dead in his yard."

Rossi sighed. "Then it sounds like you're doing all you can, Penelope."

"Thank you, sir," she said sweetly. The second she closed off the call she morphed into a dragon with cat glasses and breathed at her keyboard, "_Sounds like_? Give me something to _go on_, damn it."

"Baby Girl," a familiar voice said from immediately behind her, "be patient with us. We're all going through the same things you are." Strong hands settled on her shoulders. "Nobody's a bit happy about this case."

"Every time I close my eyes," she blurted, "I see—I see—" And she saw it again, saw Aaron Hotchner's body convulsing, and she shook her head so hard that her glasses flew off. "And it's like Georgia, like—" _Terrific_. Now she also saw Reid's bloodied face at the hands of Tobias Hankel.

She used the time that she spent groping for her glasses to collect her courage. "I went for counseling," she confided to Derek, and it was the first time she had ever admitted it to him. To anyone, actually. "After Reid, I mean. Back when it was Dr. Wilmoth."

"So did I," Morgan said softly. "So did JJ and Hotch. It wasn't easy for any of us seeing that, going through that, Baby Girl. Nobody likes to feel helpless, and even though we feel that way a lot in this job, knowing the victim—that makes it harder. But we got to the other side on that one, and we'll get to the other side of this one, too."

**~ o ~**

After a while, Warden turned onto an unimproved road. Water sprayed up and gravel rattled off the bottom of the car as they bounced along in muddy ruts. Branches scraped along the windows and body of the vehicle. The current symphony—third played, so they were better than two hours beyond the place with the weeds—seemed neither ominous nor touching, which Aaron found oddly reassuring.

_I'll take any comfort I can get…._

After negotiating a couple of seriously rugged pieces of terrain, the sedan jounced to a halt. Warden shut off the ignition and released the catch on his own seat belt. "I won't be long," he said. "Don't go anywhere." Same smug, self-satisfied tone he had used earlier in the day.

_Are we even in the same day? I know that we aren't in the same state; I saw Pennsylvania highway signs hours ago, way back at the shuttered old gas station. Depending on the way he was headed, we could be in New Jersey by now. Or New York. Or Ohio, or even Michigan._

"I'll stay put," he replied, knowing he was lying, hoping that Warden's profiling skills weren't as sharp as they had seemed earlier. Warden climbed out of the car. Aaron heard the patter of rain shaken off tree branches, then the door shut with a thump.

He held his breath and listened carefully for sounds indicating the direction Warden was headed. He thought he heard him just ahead of the car, but there was so much ambient noise from the wind shaking more water down onto the car's roof and windshield that he could not be sure.

Cautiously he lifted his hands and raised just a little of the edge of the blindfold.

He saw … nothing but blackness. Wherever they were, there were no available sources of light, and between the foliage overhead and cloud cover, no light from moon or stars could reach them.

Even turning in his seat as best he could, he saw not even a glimmer of illumination.

_Which means that Warden has a flashlight. Or night vision devices._

He lowered the elastic bandage back over his eyes. Listening with all his being for any sound of Warden's return, he began to raise his arms up and over his head. He groped behind the headrest with fingers as clumsy as they were sore, trying to locate the knots that secured his head, as Warden had put it, _Like your lap tray: in the upright position_.

_Noise._

He lowered his hands back to his lap and listened.

_Another noise. _

Warden's voice, low and conversational.

_He isn't working alone, I figured that wrong, shit, shit, shit …_

"... Just another minute," Warden said from not far away.

Aaron hoped he had returned the blindfold to its exact previous position.

The door opened and after the complete darkness he could sense the light through the fabric of the bandage. He turned toward the driver's side of the car, his features neutral.

"I told you I wouldn't be long," Warden said. The car dipped slightly as Warden climbed back behind the wheel, but he kept the door open and the overhead light on. He sensed Warden bending forward, apparently reaching for something. "I need you asleep right now," his captor continued, grasping Aaron's left arm. "Hold still now, little pinch—"

Hotchner fought the drug, but it was a losing battle. As the world went numb and fuzzy, his last conscious thought was, _Did I just hear a horse?_


	5. Arrival

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Five**

**Arrival**

It was past 9:00 PM. Morgan could hear the cleaning crews working their way through the outer corridors.

He closed the last file folder, replaced it exactly where he'd found it, and left Hotch's office. As Acting Unit Chief, only he had the authority to search there, and as he'd suspected, there'd been nothing even slightly out of the ordinary. Reid was presently going through Hotch's computer records, searching for suspicious emails or anomalous files saved or created within the past couple of months, just to be on the safe side.

Making his way down the short staircase to the bullpen area, Morgan glanced over as the glass doors to the BAU opened and Rossi and Prentiss entered. Even though he knew they would have called him right away if they'd discovered anything useful at Hotch's place, he was still disappointed to see the bleak expressions on their faces. They were experienced crime scene investigators, not perhaps in the technical footprints-and-bodily-fluids sense, but rather in reading objects present at crime scenes—and those that should have been but were missing—for behavioral clues about both UNSUB and victim.

Hotch, however, was not the kind of guy who stamped his personality over all his belongings, laying it out for public display. He was neat, tidy, orderly, and basically kept himself _to_ himself, except for those dearest to him. Glimpses of light sometimes shone out from around the edges of the inner doorway he so carefully kept closed, and on the few occasions he'd allowed it to crack open slightly, the momentary gleam from inside had been tantalizingly warm. But those occasions were few and far between, Morgan thought with dismay, though he fully recognized Hotch's right to privacy.

_In this job, there are just some things we can never share, even with those we hold closest. That's just the way it is, unfortunately._

"Reid's ready for us," came J.J.'s voice from above, just outside the conference room. She, too, had come back disappointed a couple of hours before from her investigation of the UNSUB sighting at McDonald's in Alexandria. There had been no useful witnesses ("he had big ugly sideburns"), and even though most of the video surveillance had been down, a private camera across the street had captured the truck entering the lot. A lone internal camera had recorded the UNSUB studying the menu board, had caught him smiling genially at the counter-guy, had shown the odd little formal bow he had given the same counter-guy when he received his food order.

_Nothing_ about the man had seemed even remotely nervous or excited.

Morgan, Rossi, and Prentiss entered the conference room to find Garcia and Reid already seated at the table, Penelope frowning over her laptop while Reid made a few final taps on his tablet. As they took their seats, his notes abruptly appeared up on the display area at the front of the room, projected in a calendar-type format.

_A. HOTCHNER TIMELINE_, read the title on the screen.

The notes began at the beginning of that week, the week of May 9-15, 2010.

Under Sunday, May 9, Reid had typed _In Milwaukee, Bow-tie Killer Case_. The same entry was repeated for the next two days. On Wednesday, May 12, Reid had written _2315, Jet Arr VA,_ then_ 2340, Arr BAU_. Thursday the 13th read _0125, Dep BAU._

Reid glanced around the table. "Everybody agree so far? Anytime you see an asterisk, it indicates a reasonable assumption."

Morgan knew the question was basically a courtesy, since Reid's eidetic memory kept track of such facts far better than anyone else on the Team could. However, there was always a chance one or more of them had witnessed Hotch do something that Reid hadn't, so the question wasn't entirely moot.

But no one spoke up, and heads nodded all around.

"OK," Reid went on. "We all had stand-down on Thursday, but Hotch swiped his key in at 8:22 Thursday morning, and he was here until almost 1800."

"Preliminary budget meetings," Rossi murmured. "These days Aaron doesn't dare miss one."

They exchanged glances across the table. With Bureau resources shrinking, they had to fight for every dollar they got. There was no way Hotch was about to skip a meeting and let some other unit possibly lay claim to money that he felt belonged to his people.

"So," Reid said, and slid Thursday's schedule up on the screen. _Arr 0822, Dep 1729, _was first, followed by_ ~1900-2359 Home*, _then came the most critical day: Friday the 14th, _0000-0530, Home*,__0605, Arr BAU, _and _1345, Dep BAU_.

"I happen to know Hotch left here at 1:45 on Friday because I rode down in the elevator with him. He mentioned he was having a vacation at home that weekend, and I guess I must've given him a funny look, 'cause he sighed and told me that he and Jack were going to camp out in their back yard. Apparently Jack's had the camping bug for quite a while now."

Prentiss consulted her own tablet. "Hotch keeps an oversized calendar posted low on the wall of the kitchen," she said. She nodded toward JJ. "Like the one you have for Henry in the hall outside his room," she added, "but more words, less pictures. On the square for today, you could see where Hotch printed 'CAMP OUT!' in block caps." A faint, melancholy smile drifted across her face. "Jack added a cartoon of a tent in brown crayon."

"Are you sure it was Jack?" Reid asked her.

Her lips twitched. "I know Hotch is no artist, but I'm sure he could pull off a better drawing of a tent. Besides, their tent is blue and square, not brown and—" Her graceful fingers described an A-shaped pup tent in the air. "Not a triangle-shape. Hotch would have used a blue crayon and got the shape right."

Rossi took up the narrative smoothly. "There was a register tape from the supermarket that he usually uses, stuck on the fridge and time-stamped 2:52. It listed hot dogs, juice boxes, marshmallows, and something from the bakery department. I found all these items in the refrigerator or on the counter. The bakery box contained six frosted brownies. There was also a short list on the counter in Hotch's handwriting that I _think_—you know how Hotch's handwriting is, a step or two up from hieroglyphics—anyway, I _think_ it said, tent, tarp, Coleman, fuel, bags, pillows, and then red LED-something, probably a particular flashlight."

As Reid added the supermarket time to the timeline, Rossi consulted one of his own, handwritten, notes, then continued, "The tent and tarp were in the back yard on the picnic table. There were a Coleman lantern and stove still in the garage on a shelf, and there was a gallon can of fuel near the garage door. Given their locations, it's likely that he'd returned to the garage for those items when the attack happened."

"So, OK," said JJ, twiddling her pencil. "Hotch left the grocery store a little before three and he tagged into his home security system at 3:09. The UNSUB left McDonald's at 2:20. He was fourteen minutes from Hotch's house, but he doesn't show up on the video surveillance until 3:42." She glanced over at Reid, who was updating the timeline as she spoke. "So what was he doing in that other hour and eight minutes? Wherever he was, he shows up on no traffic cams whatsoever, so he was on back streets."

"He wasn't following Hotch," Garcia contributed. "He wasn't in the supermarket lot and he wasn't at Quantico and he wasn't even on any of the main routes from it. And he drives past the house twice before he stops, and then—" She looked at JJ for confirmation. "It almost looks as though it was completely random, like he was just a—a target of opportunity."

**~ o ~**

When he returned to consciousness he was restrained on a hard, cold floor. His clothing was drenched; he could hear water dripping from his hair down his earlobe and into the puddle beneath it. He groaned and a hand grasped his shoulder.

The bandage around his head was gone. His eyes flew open. He stared at Warden, who knelt on the floor beside him, smiling. Aaron met the man's amused gaze.

"Hello, there," Warden said mildly.

"Permission to speak?" Aaron whispered.

Warden sighed like a mildly exasperated parent. "Very, very briefly."

"Why am I wet again?"

"There's no road anywhere around here," Warden replied. "I had to bring you here on a sledge behind my horse. There wasn't much rain, but there was a lot of runoff from the trees."

_So I did hear a horse._

"A sledge."

"A sledge," Warden repeated in a pleasant tone. "For the most part, wagons have wheels, sleighs have runners, and sledges are just dragged, brute force, behind a motivating source. Mine is made of willow branches, and it's almost one-hundred-seventy years old. It was used by pioneers in this area."

_No roads. That'll make Garcia's job harder._

"Where are we—"

"Don't say anything more. You no longer have permission to talk." He set a sharp, shiny knife against Hotchner's lips. "I don't like hurting people. When you get to know me, you'll find that I'm not a cruel man at all—but you _will_ obey me. I don't hesitate to punish disobedience and disrespect. To let such things slide is a cruelty of its own."

He forced himself to lie very still, to show nothing at all. _When you get to know me_. Warden had no immediate intention to kill him. Right, something about taking five years of his life. _I don't like to hurt people_. Probably bullshit; he might believe it, probably did believe it, but he'd certainly been enthusiastic with the damn cattle prod. Aaron's muscles still ached from the repeated spasms the shocks had triggered and he was sure at least one of his fingers was broken.

He wriggled a little, just to get a sense of how Warden had tied him up this time.

His wrists were still bound together, but now they were tied to his neck so that his hands were bunched up under his chin. His ankles were also tied now, secured to something that he could not see from the angle at which he lay. The room was small and cold and iron-gray in color.

"Hold still," Warden chided in the tone one might use with a recalcitrant child.

Aaron channeled all his energies into studying his captor close up and in decent—no, in _bright_ light, almost blindingly bright light. The ceiling was divided into four squares, each of which contained a high-intensity light behind heavy glass or plastic. He wished that the illumination didn't remind him so much of a surgical suite. He'd seen in his day a lot of horrible things done by people who thought they were performing valuable medical experiments.

_Stop scaring yourself. Do your job. Look at him._

_OK, late forties, early fifties, average size, fit, with the complexion of a man who spends a lot of time outside. Bright blue eyes, intelligent eyes. Eyes that would miss damn little. Right-handed. Well-manicured hands, salon haircut. Logo for an Atlantic City casino on his tee shirt. Old shirt, worn almost through at the shoulder. Cheap, thrifty? Not interested in clothes? Or a gambler, perhaps even a regular denizen of the casinos? Is that his "lucky shirt"?_

Warden's knife hand was dead steady and his voice was serenity itself. His face reflected neither curiosity nor excitement.

He tapped the blade against Aaron's lips. "Let's have a brief review," he said. "My name is Warden and your name is Prisoner. That should sound familiar. In a while, when you've begun to demonstrate a satisfactory level of humility and contrition, I may rename you Penitent. There will be rewards with that change of status—rewards and privileges—but you stole five years of my life, so don't expect to get a promotion any time soon."

_Intelligent, organized, determined, motivated. _

Hotchner repressed a sigh.

_Crazy._

"A quick question," the man who called himself Warden said. "Where were you born?"

_What the hell?_

"Virginia," Hotchner replied.

"Where in Virginia?"

He could think of no advantage to lying. "Manassas."

Warden nodded thoughtfully. "And do you know what time you were born?"

As a matter of fact, he did. It had been a modest family joke: _Aaron will always be late for lunch._

"A few minutes after noon," he answered. "Three or four minutes, I think."

His tormentor sat back on his heels with a contemplative expression. "Capricorn ascendant," he said finally. "I should have seen that one coming. But your Scorpio midheaven gives you the idea that you have a free pass to bend the rules."

_This is about astrology? What the fuck?_

Slowly, keeping his voice steady, conciliatory, he said, "I don't understand..."

"Hush." The blade brushed his lower lip again. "Speak only when you're spoken to."

"But I _was_ spoken to!"

Warden shook his head in exasperation. "Speak only to reply to _questions_," he said.

Aaron nodded his understanding. He thought he could probably work his way out of this. At least the guy's rules seemed consistent. And here in the confines of this little gray room, he didn't seem inclined to depend so much on his fucking Enforcer.

Ninety-seven percent of the time, the only reason your captor doesn't want you to talk is that every time you open your mouth, you go off script and mess up his little fantasy. And if there is a fantasy involved, then you're probably looking at sexual sadism. Warden appeared to be your basic personal cause offender, but he did have a sadistic streak, apparently one that he was in denial about. A sexual sadist in denial was nightmare fuel.

_But the Team is on this; all I have to do is stay alive long enough for them to get here._

The blade moved from his mouth to his shirt. Aaron braced himself, recalling how Foyet had driven the knife into his body repeatedly, all the time seeming every bit as calm and detached as this man.

He lay motionless, letting his eyes flicker around a little bit, taking in his surroundings. He was on the floor of a metal cube, no more than eight feet on a side, with a door but no windows. There seemed to be signs and decorations on at least two of the walls. Behind Warden he glimpsed an iron janitorial sink and a toilet. He wondered where the other guy, whoever Warden had been talking to just before the last injection, had gone.

_Or was he talking to the horse?_

Warden slid his knife beneath Hotchner's shirt and began to cut it away from his body. That was rapidly followed by his tee shirt, his khakis, his shorts, his shoes, even his socks. When he was completely naked, Warden picked up the pieces of his clothing and dropped them into a container that sounded like a cardboard box.

His attitude throughout the process was businesslike; he neither tore the scraps from his prisoner's body nor removed them with languorous, luxurious slowness.

_So…not a sexual sadist?_

Hotchner felt desperately vulnerable, but more critically, he was shivering with cold. If the temperature in the room was much over fifty, he would've been surprised, and he was lying in a puddle of water on what he now recognized as a metal floor. Even Warden's deeply tanned arms showed goosebumps. Aaron lay as motionless as possible and gazed up into Warden's face.

_Look at me, you bastard._

No sensual satisfaction glittered in his eyes. He didn't feast his eyes on Aaron's nakedness the way a sexual psychopath reveled in his accomplishments. His expression was much like that of a bureaucrat in an awkward situation, trying to explain some new regulation.

"Let me explain the setup to you very briefly," Warden said. "You are deep underground and completely dependent upon me for everything that your life requires: food, clothing, water, heat, light, breathable air—everything. I believe that you will find it in your best interests to cooperate with me. It's the only way you will ever earn any of those resources your body will soon begin to crave.

"It's starting to crave them already," Warden corrected himself, running a finger along Aaron's shivering upper arm. "The ambient temperature in here is a steady fifty-four degrees. I have to leave for a few hours. When I come back, I will expect you to have untied yourself and put on your uniform. Your reward will be, depending on your cooperation, between one and four boxes of resources.

"Do you understand me?"

Aaron looked away. "Yeah."

_Oh, stop it. Face the man._

He didn't particularly want any kind of intimacy with his captor, but he had to find out what kind of relationship Warden thought that they had. Deliberately he made himself look deep into Warden's eyes, trying to force a connection.

_What do you see, you inadequate little fuck? What turns your crank about having me naked and helpless? Anything?_

But nothing ruffled Warden's faceless-bureaucrat features, and Aaron was unable to hold the man's gaze. "Good," Warden said. He reached over and pulled a knot out of a cord. Suddenly Hotchner's hands were free, still bound together, but no longer connected to his neck.

_And my watch is missing. When did he remove that?_

"Remember, now, untie yourself and put on your uniform. When I come back, you may ask me two questions, and only two. Think about them carefully! _Hasta la vista_, Prisoner!"

Without a backward glance, the man arose, collecting his cardboard box with all that was left of Aaron's possessions, and vanished through a heavy iron door that closed with a clang and rattled as locks—more than one—two? Three?—were engaged on the other side.

Aaron blinked in disbelief at the lights blazing above him. _What if Warden was lying? What if he doesn't come back?_ For some reason, the image of the forgotten prisoner from Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride—a caged skeleton in tattered rags with a sword through his chest—popped into his mind. He and Jack had seen it just last year, when he'd surprised his son with a weekend trip to Disneyland. _No, can't let myself think that way! He'll be back, he will, I know he will..._


	6. Changing Expectations

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Six**

**Changing Expectations**

The first thing Hotchner did was apply the tips of his canine teeth to the knots that held his wrists together. Now that he could move a little, he saw that his neck had been attached to the top leg of a metal cot. Presumably his feet were attached to the bottom leg. He rolled a little so he could see the leg clearly. It was attached to the floor with an L-bolt. The heads of the screws had been melted flat with a soldering gun.

Organized. Meticulous.

_And a uniform, huh?_

Hotch had seen every conceivable kind of "uniform" forced on captives by their tormentors, everything from jailhouse jumpsuits to togas to generic fatigues to kinky underwear. Given a choice, he decided, he would cast his vote for the fatigues. They were likely to be the warmest.

Aaron teased one strand of the cord free—the knots were surprisingly loose and easy to gain access to—and whatever had bound his neck to the cot fell away. He struggled up on one elbow just to get part of his upper body off that miserably cold, wet floor. The cot was the only piece of furniture in the tiny metal box. There were shelves and hooks and two recessed areas on the same wall as the door that looked like they might open up in some way. Then there was what appeared to be a pair of photo collages covered by Plexiglas bolted to the walls, but no chairs and nothing that might serve as a table.

Now he could see that the janitor's sink had a pump handle, not a faucet, and that there was a small white rectangle of paper taped up on the wall above the pump. He leaned forward and squinted. _Water not safe for drinking_, it warned in dark red letters.

He took a longer, more detailed look around him. There had to be cameras, or at least one camera, focused on him. Personal grievance, revenge UNSUBs, like Warden was shaping up to be, were generally far too controlling to leave their prey unmonitored. More likely he was hunched somewhere in front of a display, watching to see how quickly Aaron got loose, how quickly he scrambled into his uniform. How thoroughly he analyzed his surroundings.

_Well, let him watch. There's nothing I can do about it anyway._

There were four bright and shiny, shallow little depressions in the floor, less than a quarter-inch deep, arranged in a rough square. When he got his left hand free he reached out and touched one of the hollowed-out places. He detected tiny splinters of metal in it; the depressions had been ground out recently.

And then there were the signs—four of them, all stark white with black lettering, each of them covered with Plexiglas and bolted to one of the walls. With increasing dismay, he read the signs, each of which bore the same text:

_Warden, I wish to acknowledge my part in your wrongful incarceration. __I betrayed my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States. I participated in a conspiracy to convict an innocent man. I am ashamed of and sorry for my malfeasance. I beg permission to do what I can to make restitution for the wrongs I have done to you._

_I understand that the length and severity of my sentence are contingent upon my penitence and good behavior. I thank you for your continuing effort to make my time served as humane and dignified as is consistent with my offenses against you and the justice system._

OK, that wasn't good, but it at least gave him something to work with. His captor had claimed that he, Aaron, had stolen five years of his life. He was an ex-con, one who felt that he had been wrongly convicted and somehow Hotchner had participated in it. He had played a part in a large number of prosecutions, but the number was _finite_, goddammit. This was a puzzle with a solution.

And somehow, Elle Greenaway and Jason Gideon were involved in it. And whoever the hell Diana was. He had known three Dianas that he could recall, and none of them seemed at all likely to be involved in this situation. There had been a Diana at his junior high, a tall and sallow-skinned girl who played the trumpet and drew pictures of dolphins. A Diana had been in his class at Georgetown Law, short and acerbic and very clever. That Diana had wound up doing pro bono law in the Pacific Northwest. She had died a few years earlier, some kind of leukemia. He and Haley had sent a memorial to—he put his memory to work—Sierra Club, he believed. Then there was Spencer Reid's schizophrenic mom, a former college professor now committed to long term care at a Las Vegas area sanitarium.

He jerked as if the Enforcer had jabbed him. During the mess with the so-called Fisher King, Elle had been gravely wounded because Jason Gideon chose to break the rules that their UNSUB had laid down. There had been a Diana Reid connection, too: She had known the UNSUB when he was committed to the same institution; he had collected his information about the Team from her discussions of Reid's letters to her.

But nobody went to jail for that! Randall Garner, the erstwhile Fisher King, had blown himself up. His daughter had been killed by Frank Breitkopf, in yet another case that became way too personal for the BAU. Gideon had still been on the team then, but Greenaway was gone—and the elder Dr. Reid had nothing at all to do with Frank.

_Shit, shit, shit…this all has to make sense somehow..._

He pulled himself along the cot until he was sitting upright and picked with unsteady fingers at the cords around his ankles. From that angle, he could finally see his so-called uniform. It was a set of cotton hospital scrubs in a vivid purple that Garcia would probably describe as raspberry. It wasn't a nice warm set of fatigues with a jacket, but it wasn't kinky underwear, either.

Once he was completely free of his restraints, he climbed to his feet and put on the brightly colored scrubs. The pants had a string tie and two side pockets. The shirt had short sleeves and a V neck. He wondered whether Warden was watching him dress. Had the color been a matter of convenience, or did that shade of magenta mean something to him?

He glanced around the room another time, hoping to see something he had missed on his previous views, but—no, there just wasn't much to look at. The mattress on the cot was thin and covered with fake leather in a dull shade of institutional green. Hotch raised the mattress casually, not wanting anyone who was watching him to ascribe any significance to it.

What he hoped to find was old-fashioned coil springs, spirals of malleable metal that could be pried loose and polished to needle-sharpness. What he found was even more old-fashioned: strips of rawhide woven into a lattice and bolted to the frame.

He had seen beds like that at Colonial Williamsburg as a child.

He seated himself on the cot with his knees drawn up, hugged his legs to retain heat, and did a quick physical survey. Slight rope burns on his ankles, moderate on his wrists and probably on his neck. His fingers, although swollen and darkening to purple, seemed unbroken after all, since all of the joints were moving properly.

He was tired, hungry, and thirsty. He looked at the sink and wondered how undrinkable the water really was, and why. Chemical pollution, or biological? Or both? That would make a good question, he realized. It could help fix his location—although it was a lot more critical that the Team know his location than Aaron himself. He wondered what opportunities he might get to send a message to the Team.

_OK, now what does all of this tell me?_

_He wants me alive and at least somewhat well. He supplies a commode and a sink but he warns me that the water is not drinkable. He takes my street clothes, but gives me these rather than leaving me naked. He keeps me locked up, but doesn't want to keep me chained._

_He's smart, organized, careful, and confident. If anything, he's an over-planner, which could work in my favor. He isn't surprised, jazzed, nervous, or defensive, which is more worrisome. Nothing about him suggests that he's a first-time offender. He seems to be working alone._

This was a personal cause abduction. Personal cause UNSUBs worked alone. And yet—and yet—in spite of his apparent experimentation with restraint methods, he just didn't seem like a first-time offender.

And that made no sense. Nothing made sense. The only kind of personal cause abduction that spawned repeated offenses was the politically motivated kind—and Warden had made it clear that he considered Hotchner personally responsible for putting him in jail. And political abductions are generally group activities. So far there was no evidence except for the sound of Warden's voice that he wasn't working alone, and Aaron had pretty much concluded he'd been talking to his horse back in the woods, not another person.

_He could have been talking to nobody at all, just to mess with my head._ _He has extensive expertise in the art of mindscrew, this guy…._

And he would be permitted to ask two questions. He was being encouraged to think about which questions he wanted to ask. This was not consistent with _don't talk or you'll mess up my fantasy_.

The question, "Which questions do you want to ask?" was a lot more significant and serious than he had first realized. Did he want to find out more about where he was, information that he might use to summon help if he could find his way to a phone? Or should he concentrate on more personal concerns – motivation, for instance? Or intent?

Rather than make his decision right away, he turned his head to his left, to the wall opposite the door, and surveyed the collage of old photographs that decorated the wall adjoining his cot.

_OK, what do we have here?_

_A house. A dog. A fat kid in a diaper. An Edsel, for Christ's sake. Two bearded old men with canes…._

_**~ o ~**_

Morgan barged back into the conference room with storm clouds across his face. Taking his place at the round table, he hunched his shoulders and said, "Where are we?"

Rossi engaged the acting unit chief's gaze. "Is everything OK, Derek?"

Morgan's lips compressed to a tight, disgusted line. "Just peachy," he all but spat.

"Well," said Garcia, her tone cautious, "there's progress."

His features softened. "Give me some progress," he said, his voice softening too. "I need some progress."

As Penelope began to explain the potential Michigan connection to him, Rossi stood up and excused himself.

Only one person could infuriate Derek Morgan that much. Rossi slipped out of the room and headed for the office of Section Chief Erin Strauss. She was actually leaning against the front of her desk, arms folded, a set of matching storm clouds arrayed across her brow, as though she had expected him to show up.

Dave gave her a toothy grin. "Good evening, Erin," he said. "We have a little progress to report. The Michigan license plate was the real deal; the woman who claimed that it'd been in her garage all this time was mistaken. That means that we can place our UNSUB in Adrian, Michigan, in November of last year. With luck, he lives there. He may even be headed back that way right now."

Unimpressed, she glared at him. "Not necessarily. The tag could've been stolen from the garage and the UNSUB could've come across it anywhere." She took a deep breath. "You need to have a talk with Agent Morgan."

He arched an eyebrow at her. "I do, do I?"

Her arms tightened more severely across her bosom. "He's inflexible."

_Pot, kettle._

"Is that so?"

"All I did was suggest to him that he needed to shift himself out of the mindset that the BAU has already seen everything that can exist, that someone outside your little specialty might have something useful to contribute."

_This I just have to hear._

"I've seen the video, David. Aaron was a random target of opportunity. You're wasting your time looking for connections in his past." Her pale eyes met his. "The UNSUB drove by, maybe he was deliberately cruising for prey, and he saw someone who fit his criteria."

Picking his words carefully, Rossi said, "Erin, men who are cruising for male prey don't drive through upscale residential areas with robust security systems, and then abduct men who are bigger and more fit than they are." When her eyes narrowed, he added, "They just don't."

"Look, just because you haven't seen it before doesn't mean it isn't happening now. You need to update your profiling system, because it just happened, David. Honestly, you're becoming as fossilized as Morgan is."

"He came prepared, Erin. He had a cattle prod and drugs and a fake camper cap and license plate on his truck."

She seemed unmoved. "And your so-called 'organized predators' who prey on prostitutes and young girls carry rape kits in their cars. They use disguises, ruses."

Rossi was finding it harder and harder to maintain a friendly, chatty expression. "Erin, a predator by definition preys on those who are weaker than he is."

Strauss was having none of it. "I'm concerned by your lack of imagination. He may have been cruising for a middle-aged man that met his needs, his fantasies—most predators are fueled by their fantasies, correct?—and the first he saw who fit his criteria was Aaron. He _is_ a very attractive man, after all. I can imagine some homosexual serial rapist or killer, one whose fantasies run to his type, a tall, slender professional man, finding him quite appropriate prey."

Rossi decided it would be injudicious to suggest that Strauss's theory said more about her own mindset than that of their UNSUB.

"Thank you for your input, Erin," he said tonelessly, and fled for the relative sanity of the conference room.

_**~ o ~**_

A long time later—he had nothing to measure it by, but he was sure it had been at least two or three hours—he heard an electrical whining sound followed by a rattle _(elevator?)_ and footsteps.

"Are you awake?" Warden called out loudly enough that Hotch could hear him through the metal walls.

"Yes," he called back.

There was a faint scraping sound, and then Warden's voice said "Excellent," but it sounded nearer than it had been.

That weird little patch of screening to the left of the red bar, Hotchner realized. There was an opening on the other side. Almost like a confessional.

_That's creepy._

"You recall, do you not, that you are to speak only when spoken to?"

"Yes," he replied grimly.

"Very good." There was a scraping sound; Warden was actually pulling up a chair, making himself comfortable. "Let's start with the most critical information," he said. "Are you ready?"

"Yes." He hugged his shins tighter, hoping to warm up.

"Most critical of all, the point that you must never forget for even a moment, is that while you are here, none of the requirements of life—food, clothing, heat, light, air, water, a place to sit or to lie down—none of these things is a right. They are all privileges, Prisoner. Any and all of them can be removed without warning as punishment for disobedience or disrespect. Do you understand this, Prisoner?"

He glanced around his bleak metal box. There wasn't much for Warden to remove. Light, the cot, the silly purple scrubs. Interesting that he hadn't mentioned plumbing. Was it possible that Warden had no way of cutting off his crapper access? Or was it just that he didn't want to be bothered with the cleanup that would ensue?

Did it matter?

"Do you understand this, Prisoner?" Warden repeated.

"Yes."

_Asshole._

"Almost as important as your absolute dependence on my good will is your isolation. You are seventy-four feet underground. There is no above-ground structure to mark your location. I am the only person who knows that this bunker is still here, and I don't live on the premises. I live several hours away from here. When I leave, I don't come back for days. I want you to be sure to understand what this implies: If I remove one or more of your privileges, it may be _days_ before you get it back. Punishments here are grim and inescapable. Depending on your endurance—or lack of it—they may be fatal. Do you understand me completely?"

_Understand you, yes. Believe you? Not a chance. You're a control freak; you couldn't walk away from watching me suffer even if you tried._

"Yes," he sighed.

"Because of your criminal irresponsibility, I spent five years in prison. In a just world you would serve five years in the same prison, but this isn't a just world. I have had to create my own means of exacting restitution from you. Your sentence is five years, Prisoner. Fair is fair."

_Note to self: Potential to derail Warden's plans with requests for family visitation, phone and mail privileges, exercise yard, access to library and medical facilities._

"Now, please read me the text of one of those signs posted on your walls."

"_Please," huh? Well, aren't we polite!_

Hotchner looked at the two delusional paragraphs and made his decision. For better or for worse, he would draw a line. Warden would not call all of the shots.

"I can't do that," he said, with as much courtesy as he could put into the words.

Warden's voice had an edge to it. "And why not?"

"Because it isn't true, Warden." He hoped that using the man's preferred title might take some of the sting out of what he said.

"Really? Which part isn't true?"

He reviewed the words again, gathering his courage. "None of it is true."

"Spoken like a man who has no interest in food, water, or something to warm his feet."

_Feet. Yes, God, my feet are cold. Maybe I could have picked my time a little better._

But he would not, could not back down, so he remained silent.

"Your choice, Prisoner. You've been both disobedient and disrespectful. For your punishment you'll get none of your resources. No food, no water, no bedding. No nothing. And you lose your light and heat. Goodbye."

Before Hotchner could utter a sound, the metal door slid shut.

The cell went utterly black.

He heard rapid footsteps, a rattle, and a whine. _Elevator._

Only then did he realize that the high-intensity lights had warmed the tiny room a little. In their absence the temperature quickly dropped a couple degrees.

_Oh, crap…._


	7. Darkness to Light

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Seven **

**Darkness to Light **

It was just a matter of outwaiting Warden. He dismissed out of hand the notion that his captor would deprive him of all of his so-called "resources" for days at a time. Even less likely was the notion that Warden could tear himself away from this physical location. He had to be somewhere he could see—or at least hear—his prisoner's misery.

And even if Warden did leave him there alone, the Team would find him. Even now—whenever "now" was—they would be collecting trace evidence from his garage. Garcia would be all over the Metro DC traffic cam system in search of an old blue pickup with a gray camper cap. His own security cameras had been engaged, for that matter. The Team should be looking at Warden's bland, geeky face this very moment. Of course, he would still be sporting his bangs and fake sidewhiskers, but it was only a matter of time before Garcia's facial recognition software cracked through that.

He kept his breathing slow and silent. It was possible that Warden's surveillance system was equipped with night vision capability. No, not night vision. He would have to use infrared lighting. That, or thermal imaging. There simply was no ambient light for passive night vision to enhance. And IR and thermal were pricey, really pricey. Warden's little private prison had a low tech, do-it-yourself kind of feel to it. The only window he had into Hotch's confinement right now would be an audio pickup.

_Be vewy, vewy quiet_, he thought, and he grinned faintly in the dark. _He's eavesdwopping on wabbits_.

He tried to relax, but a surge of anger overwhelmed him. He was too cold and too _stoked _to settle down. Although he recognized that his wild swings in mental state were probably due in part to his efforts to stay professional while being bitten in the butt by primal fears, the knowledge really didn't help. It also didn't help that he had no way to gauge the passage of time. He could count off a minute by monitoring his pulse rate, but that was the extent of it.

He wondered whether Warden's threat to leave him alone for days had been an idle one. He certainly hoped so. It had to be, didn't it? Regardless, he wouldn't sleep. Eventually that door would open. He intended to be ready for Warden, ready to spring, ready to fight for his freedom. His Team would come, yes, but he'd do his own part.

He stood up, the cold, wet floor stinging the soles of his feet, and made a slow circuit of his cell, searching it blindly with stiff fingers. _Suck it up, Hotch; they aren't broken. _There was that weird window-like square, maybe fifteen by fifteen, with a narrow rod running up and down its center. Aaron explored its interior. He thought possibly the back of it moved, but he wasn't able to shift it himself. The rod was thin, not much wider in diameter than a finger, but solid.

The door had no interior handles, and he couldn't even get his nails under the edges. Even if it were unlocked he wasn't yet sure how he could open it.

_How did Warden open it? Why wasn't I watching him?_

And the fucking signs, those preposterous confessions that Warden wanted him to read. He had a few words of the text memorized, and he hated them more with every passing minute, even though he knew they were a clue, a tool, an insight into the UNSUB's fantasy world.

It wounded his pride. He was a good lawyer, damn it, and he had been a fine prosecutor, an upstanding prosecutor. You didn't surge as far, as fast as Aaron Hotchner had soared without being both damn good and damn careful. He'd worked hard, prepped harder, and played by the rules.

_Leave it, leave it. Come on, now, don't let it get to you! _

He sighed and climbed back onto his bunk, where he rubbed his feet with aching fingers and wondered how long it had been. Maybe an hour, maybe two, he decided.

"Warden?" he said, keeping his voice low, calm. He listened for the space of several slow, even breaths for anything, any indication that he was being monitored.

_He _has_ to be monitoring me! OK, time to try something. I know this kind of offender. He wants validation. If a bit of acting will get me food and water, then it's worth it. Then I can keep working on him._

"You've made your point," he announced to the empty cell, hoping he wasn't just wasting his breath. Continuing, he pulled out all the stops as a profiler, went into his spiel, acknowledged that Warden was in charge, calling the shots and writing the ending to this story. He complimented the guy's intelligence, his preparation, and his sense of fair play, then did all he could to humanize himself, talking about his life, his son, about Haley, about his own experiences with injustice.

Later—a long time later—as he huddled on the cot, still trying to warm his arms and feet by rubbing them briskly, he tried yet another tack. Warden wanted begging? Fine, he'd give him begging. "I understand," he told what he fervently hoped was Warden, listening in. "Please, I was wrong. I'm prepared to read the statements. Please give me another chance."

A long time after that—his sense of time was completely hosed, but he could feel the bristles on his jaw, so it had been at least twenty-four hours since he last shaved, so, 6:30 Saturday morning, more or less—he reviewed all that he knew about the physiological changes, actual alterations in brain chemistry that could occur in captives in solitary confinement. Sometimes they were irreversible.

Over all else was facing up to the fact that he had far more buttons than he'd realized involving enclosed spaces and darkness and being far underground—and that door, almost flush against the wall. He was cold and thirsty and exhausted but he didn't dare drink water from the sink and he certainly didn't dare doze off. When Warden returned, he had to be ready for him. His best chance was to launch himself at the little prick, Enforcer or not, the minute he entered the cell.

Doing math in his head was a good way to distract himself and stay awake. Although it was hard to visualize the calculations sometimes, it was a valuable mental exercise. So he concentrated on what little he'd learned so far from Warden about his situation. The cell was roughly eight by eight feet, or 64 square feet, and he was supposedly 74 feet underground. Those two numbers multiplied together equaled...equaled—he was tired and he was getting confused easily and it had been years since he had done anything arithmetical without a freaking calculator—4440 plus 296. He moved a finger in the darkness to represent the carried _one_ in the hundreds place: 4736.

So: 4,736 cubic feet of soil and rock, probably mostly rock, hanging directly over his head.

If each cubic foot weighed 100 pounds, then, oh, _crap_: 236-point-something _tons_ of dirt and rock that could come crashing down on him with some random shift of the earth's crust.

_Not sure I needed to know that._

"OK, Warden," he said, no longer even trying to mask his desperation. "I give up, just listen: Warden, I wish to acknowledge my part in your wrongful incarceration. I betrayed my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States—I, I'm sorry, Warden, but I don't remember the rest of it…."

In a way he was relieved that he had forgotten the paragraphs. To speak those words was to admit to a lie.

_But I don't know how long I can take this..._

_**~ o ~**_

The man who earlier in his life had been known as Norton W. Charpentier rolled upright and sat on the edge of the bed. Midday sun and fragrant spring aromas poured in through the two south-facing windows of the modest room over the stables. So did the smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafting down from the main house. He might have dismissed the previous day as a dream, except for some minor discomfort in muscles rarely used so vigorously for anything more complicated than loading a Civil War cannon in a reenactment.

_I did it_, he reminded himself with a sense of satisfaction. _I have him_.

As he sat there, popping his blood pressure meds with a bottle of V-8 Fusion, he reviewed the high—and, OK, the low—points of the previous day's abduction. He wondered how Prisoner was managing his time alone in the cold and dark. How was he managing the utter isolation? Was he praying? Weeping? Was he talking to the visions that solitude and sensory deprivation inflicted on the vulnerable psyche?

Norton Charpentier knew the ways of solitary from personal experience. Because of a bureaucratic snafu, there'd been no room at the medium-security prison he'd been assigned to, so he'd ended up in maximum-security instead. Oh, it was just to be for a few days, yeah, _right_. Due to the interminable bungling, it'd turned into three months instead. And he'd spent five days in a cell with a certified psycho, a huge brute of a man named Damien who claimed the Lord had told him to strangle his wife with his bare hands—and the two kids, well, they weren't his, but bastards from his wife's lovers—so he'd disposed of them the same way.

The man's body odor had been so foul it had literally made Norton sick. After being unable to eat for two days straight, he'd dared to offer the man his deodorant, and had nearly paid for it with his life. Damien had slammed him up against the bars, staring at him as though he was some annoying insect, then hissed into his ear, "_One more word outta you, little fucker, and you're dead."_He could still remember the burning shame he'd felt afterward when he realized he'd literally crapped his pants in terror.

The guards' answer to his complaint had been a transfer to solitary—not for his attacker, but for _him_. At first it'd seemed like paradise, but then the utter lack of human contact had begun to take its toll. After he'd made numerous attempts to communicate with the guards, they'd finally responded by turning off the lights in his cell.

Before long he'd found himself screaming, praying, babbling to the forms that appeared in red on the periphery of his vision. He'd whacked his head against the wall a few times, too, thrown himself against the concrete block in fury and desperation. It hadn't killed him back then, and it was unlikely to kill Prisoner now.

He shook his head, mentally freeing himself from further consideration of his time in hell or the faithless lawyer who'd put him there. He could not afford to think about the lawyer. The surest way to give away that you had a secret was to think about it. People could read it on your face; he was sure of it. He turned his thoughts to more prosaic things: the weather, the media, the new horse in the stables below.

He snagged some fresh underwear from the bedside table and a pair of jeans and a pullover from the dresser. He studied himself in the mirror, ran a hand through his hair to tame it, and set off down the rickety wooden stairs and along the narrow gravel path to the Hawthornes' place, the source of coffee and—he sniffed delicately—_huevos rancheros_.

Bren Hawthorne looked up from the center island in her kitchen, a big woman, a substantial woman with flyaway gray hair—all deep wrinkles, deep tan, and broad smiles. All year round she lived in jeans and flannel shirts, except for those occasions that called for crinolines and parasols. "Sarge!" she boomed as she shut off the food processor. "Didn't hear you come in last night! When I woke up and saw your car, I said to Teddy, I said, 'My goodness, Ted, isn't he becoming just the featherfoot? Maybe he should change out and be a scout!'"

Norton—the man the Hawthornes called Sarge—gave her a quick peck on her leathery cheek. "I love artillery," he told her. "Nobody separates me from my trusty 'fifty-seven. My God, is that _chorizo_ from Mama Luz's place? I've died and gone to paradise." He helped himself to a corn muffin and a cup of coffee. "Who's the new gelding?"

"Name is Dickens," Ted Hawthorne told him from his old recliner in the corner of the kitchen. Ted was losing his hearing, so he always sat right beside the aging sound system. Today he was listening to something operatic. "Bought him from the same folks you got your Burley from. Whitmans? Whitfords? Something like that. Up on the ridge, near the Bauman place. Sweet-tempered boy."

"Speaking of Burley, how was your middle of the night ride?" Bren asked him.

He waved a vague hand. "What can I say? There's no tranquilizer like a good horse and a wooded path. You folks keep me sane. You know that, don't you?"

"Welllll," Ted drawled from his recliner, "we might say the same. Welcome breath of fresh air and intellectual stimulation when you show up, as well as the kind of gossip that reminds us of why we fled from academia in the first place."

Norton nodded toward the source of the music. "_Luisa Miller_?" he hazarded.

Ted Hawthorne shook his shaggy gray head. "_Boccanegra_," he said.

Of course. The divine duet, father and daughter discovering each other, _Figlia, a tal nome io palpito_. For an instant the former Norton Charpentier literally staggered as if punched in the heart. He deliberately turned his attention away from the bliss portrayed in Verdi's music. _No. Don't think about precious little daughters all grown up and reunited with their daddies._

_But don't think about Prisoner, either._

Venus was transiting his Ascendant, and Moon would be there soon. He would need their heat and their confidence.

Brunch. A quick run into town for building supplies and for the dance recital of the daughter of one of their local acquaintances. This would be a good day. It would keep his mind off the man in the dark. "Can I help with anything?" he asked Bren. "I can shred the cheese, or if you're thinking of making some of that Mexican cocoa..."

_**~ o ~**_

"One more time," Morgan said early on Saturday afternoon, with a sigh. He was exhausted—they all were. Nobody had slept a wink. If Aaron Hotchner'd been there, he probably would've ordered them to go home and let the Staties and the local FBI offices handle it for a few hours; to get some sleep and take a fresh look at it in the morning. But he wasn't there. He was somewhere else, and in danger, and it was up to them to bring him home. "Do we have anything new on the truck?"

Garcia touched her screen listlessly. "Lots of blue F-150 trucks, some with camper caps, some without, but none of them is our guy. It's possible he's deliberately avoiding roads that have traffic cams. On the plus side, that slows him down, wherever he's headed."

"Presuming he hasn't already gone to ground," Reid added. There was way too much energy in his voice.

Morgan wished that Reid didn't always sound so excited when he pointed something out. He knew that the kid—well, not much of a kid anymore—was just wired to lunge toward accurate data, but in that moment, it sounded way too enthusiastic for Morgan's weary ears.

The walls of the conference room were festooned with images of the furry-faced man and his battered old truck. Garcia abruptly sucked in her breath and gave a little fist-pump. "Yes! My facial analysis program's finally finished."

"All right, Baby Girl!" Morgan said, fired up again. "Let's see this bastard without all the fur."

It was admittedly a computer-generated image, blurry and cartoonish, and there was no way they could know if the man really did have facial hair, but unless the sidewhiskers were intended to camouflage an enormous scar or a birthmark, at least it gave them a better idea of what he actually looked like.

"Get that composite out to all law-enforcement agencies up and down the Eastern Seaboard," Derek told her. "And let's see that the press gets it too. Somebody out there's bound to have seen this guy."

"Whoa," said Rossi, his hands raised in protest. "Not the public. Not yet."

"We don't want to scare Furface into hurting Hotch if he—if he hasn't yet," Prentiss said.

Rossi grimaced. "I'm thinking more about what happens when we ask the public at large for help when we have this little information to go on. I don't know about you, but I'd rather we use our resources to sort through solid facts, not cranks and attention-seekers."

"Yeah, you're right," Morgan conceded. "Just the LEOs for now, Garcia."

Rossi glared at the image of the furless face. "What do you want with Aaron?" he asked it, then he turned toward his teammates. "If the UNSUB wanted to, he could have killed Aaron right there in the garage. Instead he went to a lot of trouble to get him into his truck. Even if his intention was to kill Aaron somewhere else, somewhere that's more significant, there was engagement. There was conversation. That's a lot of effort just to off somebody. So I say, alive. That leads us to, alive for what?"

Emily Prentiss consulted her own notes. "_For what_ and _By whom_ tend to interrelate," she said as she rubbed her right temple with a frustrated thumb. "But if the goal was to take him alive to some other location, then the motives we're looking at include interrogation, retaliation, sexual gratification, and ransom. There's no way this guy didn't know that Hotch is FBI. It was right there on his hat even before the UNSUB went through his pockets and checked his ID." She looked around the table. "We need to take a hard look at all four of those motives."

There was a light tapping and they all turned. Erin Strauss stood in the doorway, her arms crossed over her sweater set, her fingers toying fretfully with her pendant necklace. "Have you reached any useful conclusions yet?" she asked.

Morgan and Rossi exchanged glances. "No, ma'am," Morgan replied. "We're still looking for the truck."

Strauss looked at them one by one. "You need to go home," she said. "All of you. You've been here almost twenty-four hours. Go home, get some rest, and come back tomorrow refreshed and ready to go. There's nothing you can do here right now that the other team and the other tech staff can't accomplish in your absence. If anything—anything at all—comes up that's new, I promise we'll call everyone."

All six team members chorused, "But—"

"No," Strauss replied. "Go home. You know if Agent Hotchner were here, he'd be telling you the same thing. Go. Shoo!"


	8. In a Spirit of Compromise

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Eight **

**In a Spirit of Compromise**

"Are you awake?" Warden asked that evening, although part of him wondered—would always wonder—_Are you still there?_ And because there was just no way that the lawyer could have escaped his cell, what he really meant was, _Are you still alive?_

His prisoner's reply was hoarse, barely a croak. "Yes."

Warden slipped the latch on the fifteen-by-fifteen inch panel on the wall and slid the square door open. The lawyer hissed as the first rays of illumination hit his eyes. It probably seemed like an eternity that he'd lain there in the darkness.

The former Norton Charpentier leaned his head close to the square opening in the wall. If he squinted into the gloom beyond the red steel bar, he could just barely make out Prisoner, huddled in a ball at the center of his bed, with his face hidden behind his forearm while he adapted to the renewed light.

_We're both squinting, but for opposite reasons._

"Perhaps you're ready to be a bit more cooperative?"

The lawyer turned toward the window, his pale, stubbled face gleaming like the moon in its reflected light. His eyes were still mostly shut. His mouth was a grim line. He said nothing at all.

"Ordinarily I will not give you information that relates to time or place, but this time, I will. The time you spent locked up without light or food or water or heat was seventeen hours." He was pleased to see the lawyer's body jerk with surprise. "Yes, I'm sure it seemed like days, like an eternity. It wasn't. It was seventeen hours and thirteen minutes. Think of that the next time you decide to disobey. Think of that and imagine what it will be like when it really is days in hell, a week in hell."

The lawyer gazed bleakly at Warden as the implications of those words sank in. He seemed to have aged several years since he'd first fallen with a whimper to the floor of his garage.

"Now: Are you ready to be more cooperative?"

Prisoner nodded faintly.

At another time, Norton might have insisted he speak up, but not today. Prisoner had had his first taste of the stick; now he needed a touch of carrot. Warden reached out his right hand for the light switch for the cell's interior. Prisoner flinched violently from the brightness of the lights, but quickly began, one arm raised to block the intensity, to adjust to it.

When the lawyer was able to raise his head and lower his arm, to look feebly around him, Warden stuffed two shabby old beach towels through the window. "Here," he said. "You can dry the floor with these."

Prisoner unfolded his long body stiffly—he must have been huddled in that position for hours—and eased himself off the cot. He dropped unsteadily to one knee and wiped up the puddles of water that still remained where he had first lain (the air of the cell not being conducive to efficient evaporation). He mopped up the water quickly and thoroughly, then looked around as if in search of where to place the soggy towels.

"For the time being, you can hang them over the lip of the sink," Warden suggested.

Prisoner nodded and did exactly that, then wobbled back to his cot and resumed his previous position, looking up warily through the window at his captor.

Norton thrust his hands into his jacket pockets. "Here, Prisoner," he said, "a reward." He took a tangerine and two rolled-up pairs of white sweatsocks from his jacket and lobbed them in through the little window and over to the cot. "I'll be back in a few minutes and we can continue the conversation we started last visit."

On his way to the storage shelves where he had parked the handtruck with the boxes of food and supplies for his prisoner, he repeatedly second-guessed himself.

_Shouldn't have told him how long he had been in total isolation._

_Should have insisted that he answer aloud._

_Shouldn't have rewarded him so quickly._

_Should have given him only one reward, not all three._

He heard the toilet flush as he worked. _Nothing like taking something in to get the putting-it-out systems working,_ he thought with a faint smile.

Ten minutes later he steered the dolly with its four cardboard cartons over near the window and peered in at his prisoner. The lawyer still sat with his shoulders hunched over and his knees drawn up. It was an odd posture for a man of his age and standing. He seemed to be wearing both pairs of socks. He had been briskly massaging his bare arms, but quit when he saw Warden. _Still too proud for his own damn good, _Warden thought. The tangerine was no longer in evidence, and a citrus aroma filled the air. He must have been ravenous.

"Your name is Prisoner," Norton said calmly. "My name is Warden." He waited a few seconds, and asked, "What is your name?"

Habits of a lifetime die hard. The lawyer got _Aar–_ out before he stopped himself. "You prefer to call me Prisoner," he rasped. Hating it. Hating _him_, hating his Warden.

"And what is my name?"

His jaw tightened. "You call yourself Warden." He could have been saying _Satan_.

_And with all the wiggle-words like _you call me_, and _you call yourself_. So that's the thanks I get for giving you a goddamn tangerine…._

"Now," Warden said, "read me the text of one of the signs posted on your wall."

The lawyer's eyes shut in despair, but he demonstrated no surprise at all. He had obviously seen this coming, and had considered what his response would be. "I'm sorry, Warden," he said in a low, steady voice, "I don't mean any disrespect, but I can't do that. It's a lie."

"What happened to your promise to do everything I asked, to the best of your ability?"

Prisoner considered that. "Warden," he said slowly and carefully, "I can say it, but I can't promise to mean it."

"Do you enjoy correction that much?"

Prisoner shook his head slightly. He visibly braced himself, waiting for his punishment to be named.

"Would you be open to a compromise?" Norton asked. "Lawyers love compromises, don't they?"

The lawyer glanced up. His expression was nakedly hopeful, but he said nothing.

"You call it lies," Warden began. "When you examine the evidence you'll find that every word of it is truth—but it's not my responsibility as your Warden to convince you. Conviction takes time. What I will ask you instead is to recite the text as text. Call it a fine point, but lawyers love fine points, too, don't they? When you read those paragraphs—and you will be required to read them every time I visit; it isn't negotiable—it will be with our common understanding that at this point in your sentence, you don't agree with them."

He peered in at Prisoner. "Is that a compromise you can live with?"

The man stared into space for perhaps half a minute, then nodded slowly. "Yes," he said in a hushed voice. "Yes, Warden. Thank you." That part took a lot out of him, the thanking.

"Then read the sign to me."

The lawyer drew a steadying breath and began, his tone flat. "Warden, I wish to acknowledge my part in your wrongful incarceration," he said. "I betrayed my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States. I participated in a conspiracy to convict an innocent man. I am ashamed of and sorry for my malfeasance. I beg permission to do what I can to make restitution for the wrongs I have done to you.

"I understand that the length and severity of my sentence are contingent upon my penitence and good behavior. I thank you for your continuing effort to make my time served as humane and dignified as is consistent with my offenses against you and the justice system."

"Well done," Warden said. "That wasn't so bad, was it? Now come over here. Put your hands through this window, one on each side of the bar."

He backed up several paces so Prisoner could not reach for him, so he would have to stretch his arms far out in front of him. Norton knew the lawyer was cold and weak and weary, but he was a trained FBI agent—and if one of the online news reports Norton had discovered was accurate, he had killed the notorious Boston Reaper with his bare hands. No, this man would be getting nowhere near Warden.

The lawyer approached the window and obediently stuck his arms out around the bar.

Norton extended his own hand and examined Prisoner's fingers. Several of them were red and swollen, but none of them seemed to be canted at an unusual angle. He held out a pair of handcuffs just within reach of the lawyer's right hand. "Take these," he said, "and put them on. When you're cuffed, I have a little surprise for you."

Surprising hands and arms they were, too—not particularly muscular, but thickly furred, and precise in their movements. Workmanlike. When he had closed the handcuffs on his wrists, he clasped his hands together loosely and—just stood there.

Warden moved to the door and punched in the codes on all three electronic locks. Each code was different, and not a one of them in any way related to anything he might find important. The numbers included no birth or death dates—every code had been randomly generated and then memorized. Warden _rocked_ at memory tasks, and he loved numbers. Now that he had his prisoner, he would change the numbers regularly too, just in case.

When all three deadbolts had slid away, he gently pushed the door open and entered the cell, pushing the hand truck before him. He set the hand truck close by the cot, then ducked back out to collect a wooden ladderback chair.

Prisoner, he noted, watched him intently as he entered, watching his body and the door—and the handtruck with its stack of cardboard boxes—not his face. When Warden had settled the chair into the depressions marked for it, he closed the door. It sealed almost seamlessly against the wall with a sigh and a snick of locks reengaging, and a hint of confusion crossed Prisoner's stubbled features. He was observing, analyzing. Warden could almost read his thoughts. _All right, now how in hell does_ Warden _get out of here?_

Sharp-witted guy. In another time, in another world, perhaps they could have been friends. Having a beer or two over a game of Scrabble. Forwarding math puzzles and amusing photos to each other in email. Perhaps participating in lively political and philosophical debates.

But not this world.

Without a word Warden turned the handtruck and began unloading boxes onto Prisoner's cot. Evidently things happening behind his back rattled Prisoner, because he kept glancing back over his shoulder, even when it should have been clear that all Warden was doing was some basic resource management. Judging from the lawyer's nervous and troubled gaze, it almost looked as though he feared Warden was about to unload instruments of torture instead.

On the plus side, Prisoner clearly recalled that he was to speak only when spoken to. Though probably bursting with questions, he stood silently, barely even shifting his weight, his eyes fixed on his captor. Warden, for his part, seated himself on the cot between two of the cartons of supplies.

"This is the way of the world," he announced. "During the course of your confinement here I will visit from time to time, on an irregular basis, with generally an interval of two to six days between my appearances. On rare occasions visits will be closer together—or further apart. At any time that I arrive, I will expect to find both you and your quarters spotlessly clean. You are at all times to be clean-shaven, with your nails trimmed and your uniform recently laundered.

"Secondly: Your floor must be free of dust and food particles, any possessions that I have entrusted to you are to be stored in good order, and your bed must be made up properly.

"Thirdly: If you have been given an assignment, I will expect to find it carried out correctly and to the letter—and since you will never know when to expect me, it is to your advantage to police your quarters assiduously and give first priority to completing your assignments. Do you understand these three rules?"

The lawyer shifted positions slightly. "Yes," he replied, but his voice was low, not far removed from a resentful growl.

"I know that it won't dissuade you, but I advise you against wasting too much mental energy planning an escape. The door will never open except when you are shackled and immobilized. Even if you were to render me unconscious or kill me, it would profit you nothing, since you could not reach the door—and even if you could, it opens only for me. You would merely be guaranteeing yourself a long, slow death. Do you understand me?"

"Yes." Barely audible.

Warden doubted that the lawyer truly believed him, but he sympathized with the siren call of skepticism. In time, Prisoner would fully understand his situation. In time, he would embrace it. For now—well, he would just have to continue to be sullen and suspicious, and see how far that attitude would take him.

Warden settled one arm on the top of a carton. "And now you may ask me one of your two questions." He braced himself for the inevitable _Who are you_ and _What do you want from me_—as if he had not already answered those quite adequately to the extent he was prepared to do so at this juncture—but he rather hoped that the lawyer would surprise him.

And he certainly did.

Facing squarely toward the wall, without any effort at eye contact, he asked, "Who is Diana?"

The raw, wounded parts of Warden, the parts that still identified as Norton Waldo Charpentier, longed to pull out the Enforcer and shock the living hell out of his captive for daring to speak that name. _But he heard it_, he reminded himself, forcing himself to calm down. _He heard me invoke her name when I disabled him near Gettysburg. He has every right to ask_.

"She is my wife," Warden informed him, keeping his tone neutral. "You will not speak of her again."

The lawyer sighed once, quietly. "Followup question?"

"Absolutely not. You haven't yet earned the privilege of followup questions. I will, however, stipulate that the child with the curly blonde hair, the child who is wearing a suit with pandas on it in the swimming pool picture, is Diana as a little girl."

After a few seconds, Prisoner murmured, "Thank you."

Warden gave a sardonic grin to the lawyer's back. "You're welcome. I must leave for a bit, no more than an hour or so. During the time I'm gone, you're to unpack your resources and put them away. I believe you'll find that all of the boxes will fit neatly under your cot. The coldest spot in your cell is directly below the sink. I suggest that you store your drinking water there. You are not to eat any of the food I have supplied until I give you permission. When I return, I will expect to find your food untouched."

Warden got to his feet and reached into his pocket for the small device that enabled him to open the door from within. "I'll release your cuffs as soon as I'm outside the cell," he said. He held the device against the door and punched in a four-digit code. When the lock on the other side clicked open, he engaged the magnet and used it to pull the door open an inch or two. "You can ask your second question when I return," he added as he shut the door again.

Once all three locks were engaged, he stood about five feet from the small window and took the handcuff key from his pants pocket. "Arms way out," he commanded.


	9. Taking Stock

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And motivation to post more chapters faster!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Nine **

**Taking Stock**

During Warden's visit to his—cell, he supposed, although it felt more like a box—Aaron had been torn in several directions. Part of him had wanted to snarl, "Are you still trying to intimidate me, you delusional little loser?" Another part had wanted to scream, "No, don't do this! For the love of God, don't leave me here!" In the end, the sober profiler in him had won out over both his pride and his fear.

_Examine the evidence. Move slowly and deliberately. _

He stood for a while beside the little window with its red restraining rod, listening to the sound of Warden's departing footsteps. After a moment, he heard something slide in the distance and a rattle, and the metallic whine of the elevator.

When there was no other sound from which he might receive intelligence, he turned around and leaned his back against the wall. He wondered who had constructed this cell in the first place, since nothing about Warden's physique and presentation suggested a background in metalworking.

As to its original purpose—obviously confinement, but of whom, and for what reason?—he couldn't begin to speculate. Hotchner's ego was as healthy as the next man's, but he could not imagine that he might have done anything dramatic enough for this whole setup to have been designed and constructed for the purpose of punishing him.

Hugging himself and rubbing his arms against the cool air, Hotch leaned his head back against the wall, closed his eyes, and concentrated on mastering the panic that was trying to get a grip on his spirit.

His team was the best in the world, and Warden was an over-planner with a personal grudge. Within three days, maybe four, he calculated, if they caught some breaks and Garcia did her magic, he would be out of there.

_The boxes._

He opened his eyes and shoved himself away from the wall, then picked up the chair—a maple ladderback chair with a positively festive padded floral cotton seat cover—that sat in the four small depressions in the floor and moved it so it faced the cot. Sitting down in it, he began his initial survey of what he had to survive on.

Four boxes, all originally from liquor stores, apparently.

That might be significant.

He pulled one flap of the leftmost box toward him.

Warden, ever over-planning, had taped a printed list of its contents on the flap.

_CONTENTS, BOX 2_, it said.

4 sheets

pillow / 2 cases

3 blankets

mirror, shaving soap, safety razor

comb and brushes

wash cloth, bath soap, 2 towels, deodorant

shampoo, aftershave

toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss

nail file and clippers

_Wow._

You had to wonder about the kind of personality that would lock a man away in a metal box but make sure he had access to deodorant and _aftershave_. Obviously this cleanliness thing went way beyond simple hygienic issues. He peeked in and found that the shaving soap was a hockey puck-shaped, cellophane-wrapped green bar labeled _Brunner's Cold & Hard Water Ideal Shaving Soap, Fragrance: Key Lime._ The company was located in Athens, Georgia; he had never heard of it.

_OK, that might be useful information. _

And a _safety razor_? Nail file and _clippers_? This was either a man supremely confident that his prisoner would not commit suicide, or so callous that he didn't care. Warden had struck him as many things, including obsessive, inadequate, disciplined, and meticulous, but not callous. Passionate was closer to the mark.

_And I could always strangle myself with the dental floss…. _

He moved on to the second box and opened the closest flap.

_CONTENTS, BOX 1_, it read.

8 16-ounce bottles water

2 16-ounce bottles fruit juice

4 sandwiches

2 apples, 2 tomatoes

8 graham crackers

4 stalks celery, 2 carrots

legal pad / 2 pens

2 rolls toilet tissue

two paper grocery bags

NIV Student Bible / sweater

At last, here was something of immediate use: If Warden truly intended to be humane and treat his prisoner with dignity, then the very longest time he anticipated being away—at least this time—was eight days. More likely, he planned on four, given the sets of four in the food list.

Hotch figured he could probably manage eight days in this hole if he had to. He wondered what he was to do with the legal pad and the pens. His first prejudice was to use them to start constructing his profile of Warden—and making a list of questions as they occurred to him.

The grocery bags were from a Giant Eagle supermarket. He had seen Giant Eagles up in Frederick, Maryland. He seemed to recall that the chain was based in Ohio or Pennsylvania. _Am I still in Pennsylvania_?

The sweater, well, he could put that to work immediately, too. He scrabbled around in the box (the sandwiches were sealed in Ziploc bags and appeared to be peanut butter) and dragged out a ratty but heavy old gray cardigan with a zip-closure in front. There were no labels on it; it appeared to have been home-crafted.

Beggars couldn't be choosers. Feeling like some alternate-universe version of Mister Rogers, he pulled it on, zipped it, and settled back in his chair.

_Warm_.

_CONTENTS, BOX 3_

whisk broom, plastic dust pan

2 cleaning rags, scrub brush

1 gallon capacity plastic bucket

12-ounce plastic bottle pine cleaner

washboard, 16-ounce plastic bottle liquid laundry soap

10' plastic cord, 8 clothespins

waste receptacle with liners

steam iron / _Caution_—_do not use local water in reservoir! Bottled only!_

_A steam iron? What the fuck?_

Aaron spread the box flaps and stared inside. Sure enough, there was an electric iron in there. _So…what do I plug it into?_ He looked around carefully and found a double electric outlet low on the wall by the head of his cot. He wondered how he had missed it previously.

_And a laundry line._ Warden seemed pretty confident that Aaron would neither hang himself nor try to electrocute himself.

_Or does he hope that I will? Is that the point of this exercise? To reduce me to a level of despair deep enough that I'll kill myself and save him from feeling responsible for it?_

He poked through the rest of the contents. The "waste receptacle" was a small metal trash basket enameled black, with a fleur-de-lis pattern in gold. Inside it were three plastic bags (_Great, I can suffocate myself, too; there's just no end of suicide methods available to me_). The bags were from—he smoothed one out—Walmart. _So much for hoping it was some local outfit._

He could use that right away, too. He slipped one of the liners into the trash basket, then fished the tangerine rinds from the pocket of his scrubs and disposed of them.

_CONTENTS, BOX 4_

medicine chest with mirror

12 units aspirin, 12 units antacid

100 units multivitamins with iron

first aid kit

reading material / absorb, be prepared to discuss and defend

assignments

The appearance of the medicine chest was almost as surreal as the steam iron. It was tiny, no more than twelve by fifteen inches, but almost four inches deep, with a mirror on its front and three modest shelves. On its reverse were two fasteners with holes.

This would hang on the screw heads that protruded from the wall beside the shelf, he realized.

A first aid kit. He actually laughed aloud. _If I fail at suicide I can patch myself up, I guess. _It contained four small bandages, two gauze pads, and a one-ounce tube of antiseptic cream.

_OK, not much patching…._

_Reading material._ And he was expected to "absorb" it. What, was this crazy bastard planning to give him a pop quiz the next time he came back? Pass, and you get to eat; fail, and you starve to death? Talk about test anxiety! Well, at least whatever was in here might add to the profile, give him a little additional insight into the UNSUB. Right now he'd take any crumb of assistance he could get.

The fourth box had once held bottles of bourbon—Jack Daniels—and Hotch, who normally wasn't all that much of a drinker, felt a sudden fierce urge to feel the fiery taste of it slide down his throat. He shook aside the feeling and forced himself instead to focus on the present contents of the box. Stacked inside were three books: the American Bar Association's _Model Rules of Professional Conduct _and two books on innocence and wrongful conviction.

Finally, there were two sheets of standard printer paper, stapled in the upper left corner and folded neatly in half. Upon unfolding it, he was surprised to see that it was a printout from Wikipedia on the Act of Contrition, of all things. The text contained a brief discussion of sin and penitence and quoted various prayers of contrition from different denominations. The website's URL was printed at the bottom of each page, as was the date the document had been printed, but the information was of no help to Aaron in his isolation—it was several months old.

_He's been planning this for a long, long time._

At the bottom of the second page, Warden—it had to be Warden; the printing was just too perfectly formed to be anyone else's—had written: _Your first assignment is to write the Act of Contrition 100x. You may choose whichever version resonates best with you, but your work is to be neat, legible, and error-free._

_Well, shit._

He heard a whine and rattle and realized that he had made no progress at all in putting away his "resources," but before he could decide what to do about that, he heard the tiny screen slide open and then Warden's voice.

"You still have time," his captor told him. "I have work of my own to do here."

"Thank you," Aaron called back, because it seemed the right thing to do.

He heard a faint click, and music drifted through the screen, something else symphonic. He stood up, rolled back the sleeves of his sweater—which were a bit too long, a minor miracle in a world ill-adapted to arms as long as his—and bent to the task of organizing his cell.

**~ o ~**

Garcia's phone rang. _Tech Analyst Lynch_, the faceplate read.

Because officially, she was supposed to be resting—officially, she was apparently supposed to be able to just turn her concern on and off like a freaking microwave—when she answered it, she tried to sound sleepy.

"Pen!" Kevin all but shouted at her. "Sent you video, look at it, look at it, look at it!"

"Mmf," she said, still trying for sleepy. "Let me go turn the babies on."

"Save that line for Strauss," Kevin grumbled. "There, now. Look at it."

_He knows me too well…._

She clicked on the link he'd just sent her and breathed, "Oh holy frickin' crap, Lynch."

"Uh-huh, uh-huh," he panted. "What did I tell you?"

She watched the same blue truck drive slowly down easily two dozen streets, in December, in January, in February, in April. Twice, Hotch's van was just a few cars ahead of it. Twice it had the camper cap. Twice it didn't. Once, there was a pile of dead Christmas trees in the back, trailing tinsel from their bare branches.

But it had the same (stolen?) Michigan tags.

"Does Strauss know about this?" she asked.

Kevin gave a small, evil guffaw. "She will in a minute."

_And then ..._

Spencer Reid sat on the floor of his living room, his long legs folded in the position that three doctorates and seven years with the BAU had not cured him of calling _criss-cross applesauce_. Having shoved all his furniture against one wall, he sat in a sea of road and terrain maps, with two laptops running, one on each side of him. One computer provided a direct connection to satellite imagery, while the other ran weather patterns for the last 36 hours.

With a compass in one hand, a Sharpie in the other, and an extra ballpoint between his teeth, he marked off one route after another in all directions, taking into consideration the condition of the roads, the speed limits, and the weather, hour by hour calculating exactly how far an old pickup truck could have traveled in X number of hours and where it might have stopped for fuel.

When his phone rang, he was almost too engrossed to notice it, let alone answer, but finally he hit Talk and said, "Yeah, Garcia?"

"I think he's a local," she said. "Kevin found the same truck, same tags, all over Metro D.C. over the past six months. Sometimes with the camper cap, sometimes without. Sometimes he was following Hotch. Other times it looks like he's just running around, doing his errands. Once there was a woman driving the truck."

Reid bent and drew a huge black circle around the District and all its major suburbs.

_And then ..._

Jennifer Jareau sat cross-legged on her couch with a sleeping Henry curled up against her, his warm, strawberry-scented blond curls tucked under her chin. On her TV screen, Steve Irwin and the Wiggles warbled a painful rendition of "Old Man Emu," but she was too comfortable and absorbed even to stretch out far enough to grab the remote and shut it off.

In her free hand, the one not supporting her son's weight, she held a part of a huge sheaf of printouts and a yellow legal pad, and it was at these that she frowned now. Two of the people Hotchner had convicted back in his DoJ days were listed not as "dead," but as "presumed dead."

She fanned through the pages in search of further documentation, then sighed. The case for _presumed dead_ seemed solid in both cases. Both men had left behind property, money in the bank, and loved ones. In one case (and she inhaled sharply at this) the man had left behind almost $100,000 from a settlement for—wrongful prosecution, conviction, and incarceration?

_Holy crap! Prosecutorial error_? She shuffled more papers, then relaxed. Nope, must have been a different case than the one Hotch had been involved in. Lead prosecutor had admitted making an error and had been reprimanded and sanctioned by the Bar Association. So much for his surviving relatives going on a tear against Hotchner.

She sighed. _OK, back to the living_. The third person on her new list was a short, pugnacious drifter and serial rapist against whom Aaron Hotchner had testified. He'd been out of prison for two years and was now completing an allegedly unremarkable probation in Winston-Salem.

She finally reached out, but not for the remote. Instead, she hit Rossi's number on speed-dial. "Dave?" she said softly, trying not to wake Henry. "Do you have your list of people that Hotch prosecuted or testified against close by? Great—look at page 117. Seems like this guy had quite a hate on for Hotchner. He threatened both him and the judge right there in open court. What do you think?"

"Interesting," the profiling legend said. "And if you look at his picture right, he could even pass for Furface, couldn't he?"

She was so pumped that she didn't even notice _Wiggly Safari_ anymore.

**~ o ~**

Looking at himself in the mirror was hard. Shaving, brushing his hair, dabbing a little of the first aid cream on a couple spots where Warden's cords had rubbed his neck raw—these things were just routine enough to feel normal, but there was nothing normal about his situation. He saw the exhaustion and fear in his eyes, the anger and humiliation.

The weakness and vulnerability.

_But they're not for that little dickwad's eyes. He'll see nothing but Aaron-fucking-Hotchner, professional_.

He wrung out the washcloth and hung it over the side of the sink, then dried his hands. He squared his shoulders, adjusted the zipper on his cardigan—_God, I'm finally warm. I can handle a lot if I'm warm and the lights are on_—and turned away from the medicine cabinet.

Bed made. Books, pens, and papers on the shelf. Food and water under the sink. Cleaning supplies in the corner.

"Are you awake?" Warden called from beyond the wall.

"I am," he replied. Voice low, modulated. Jaw set. Game face on.

If Warden was telling the truth, then the only opportunities Aaron would have for escape, or even for intelligence-gathering, were the times when he "visited" the cell. His first job would be to figure out what kind of attitude, what kind of behavior, would bring Warden here most often, and keep him down here and engaged.

_And if the only thing that turns his crank is abusing me, then that's a price I'll have to pay._

The symphonic music that had drifted through the tiny, screened opening on the wall was cut off. He heard a plastic CD jewel case being closed.

The square window to the left of the door slid open. Beyond the red bar, he could see Warden in his navy blue knit pullover and his tan jacket. He had a small cardboard box tucked under his arm.

"Hands out," he said, and dangled the handcuffs just barely within Aaron's reach.

Hotch extended his arms, wondering whether Warden would eventually get sloppy about this aspect of his captivity—_hoping_ that he would get sloppy, because otherwise, physically overcoming the guy would pose some serious problems. He snapped the cuffs on, noting that Warden seemed unconcerned with how tight they were, as long as they were secure.

_Take your blessings where you can find them_.

There was a faint tapping to his right. He held his breath, the better to identify it. _Fingers on a keypad; those are electric locks._

_Not entirely low-tech, do-it-yourself, then_.

Warden pushed the door open. Hotchner kept his head facing mostly forward and tried to get a covert look at the layout of the keypad. No, key_pads_. Three of them, each one right under another. All seemed to be the same layout, possibly same manufacturer.

"Hello," the little dickwad said, almost cheerfully. "Place seems to be in order."

Aaron almost replied to that, then decided that probably Warden hadn't meant it as an invitation to speak.

"What's your name?" he asked.

_Here we go again…_.

"You prefer to call me Prisoner," he said.

"And what is my name?"

"You've ordered me to call you Warden."

There was movement. Out of the corner of his eye, Aaron could see that Warden had taken the Enforcer out of his jacket pocket.

"Let's try that again, shall we?" Warden said. "And this time, simple declarative statements, no wiggle words allowed, and a bit more respect. What's your name?"

Aaron decided that the battle wasn't worth the effort. "Prisoner," he said, and then amended it to, "Prisoner, sir."

"And mine?"

"Warden, sir."

_Feel nothing. Show nothing. Miss nothing_.

"Where did you put the ropes you were tied up with when you first arrived?"

The question surprised him. "They're in the trash basket by the door," he said. "Should I have saved them?"

He braced himself, half-expecting a shock, but all Warden said was, "Keep them, throw them away, whatever you like. I was merely curious."

He heard the creak of leather as Warden sat down on his bunk. "You may ask your second question now."

Keeping his tone even and respectful, he said, "What was your sentence, sir, and how much of it did you serve?" He knew it was an incendiary question, knew that Warden had expected to be recognized, but hoped that his captor would be distracted into focusing on the second part of the question.

"Twelve years," Warden replied, his voice as even as Hotchner's. "I served four years, eleven months, and twenty-two days."

_Yes. Too busy getting the numbers right to notice that I still don't know who the hell he is._

Hotchner mentally reviewed the kinds of crimes most likely to rate both that kind of sentence and that early a release. Even with those clues and the name of the man's wife—_if he was even married at the time; she could have met him afterward, or even while he was in prison_—he was still at a loss.

Another creak: Warden was on his feet.

"It's time for me to leave," he said. "I have a long drive ahead of me. I'll try to get back here as soon as I can. Remember to get your assignment done."

"Sir, I—"

"Speak only when you're spoken to."

"But—"

He felt the contacts of the Enforcer along the back of his neck and closed his eyes. _No, please don't. Please_. He stood as still as he could. When no shock occurred, he finally opened his eyes and looked out into the shadowy depths of the anteroom that appeared to surround his cell.

_Hmmm._ It seemed sort of like a cave, sort of like a mine. It made sense that Warden had taken advantage of a geological feature that was already present. And then he remembered: Warden had called this place a bunker. _Gotta give that some more thought._

Warden took something out of his pocket, held it against the door, tapped in a code, and then pulled the door open slightly with the device, as though it might contain something like a magnet. He had left the small box he'd been carrying behind, no doubt on Aaron's bed.

The door shut, the locks engaged.

"Arms," Warden said. After he'd released Hotch from the cuffs, he repeated, "I'll return as soon as I can." He slammed the window shut and Aaron heard a bolt sliding home.

When Warden's footsteps had receded, when he heard the rattle and whine of the elevator, Aaron sat down on the bed and opened the box.

Inside was a sectioned disposable picnic plate that contained a turkey sandwich, a bunch of grapes, and a narrow slice of peach pie. Forcing himself to eat the food slowly was one of the hardest things he'd done since his abduction. When he was finished, he was so sleepy that he wondered whether the food had been drugged, but he couldn't stay awake long enough to prove anything to himself, one way or the other.

**~ o ~**

Late that night, once he'd rescued the potted palms, the tarps, and the magnetic signs from the back of a certain blue Ford F-150, the former Norton Charpentier rapped on the back door of the small brick structure that dominated the rural property. "Doc?" he called. "You up?"

After perhaps twenty seconds, a feeble voice said, "That you, Sarge?"

"Yes, sir," Norton replied jauntily. "I brought you some of Bren's deep-dish peach pie."

The door swung open. The elderly man who occupied the house ushered him in. "Music to my ears," he said, "and magic to the gustatory processes. Come in, come in. Care for a nice cup of herbal tea?"

Norton beamed at the old man, who rarely left his house; rarely, in fact, left the huge old-fashioned kitchen he used as office, den, and living room. "Tempting, but I'm between here and there, so to speak, and I don't have much time." He peeked past the old man to the laptop sitting among stacks of books and papers on the table. "Who has your attention tonight?"

"Ah, the _Lzhedimitrijs_, as usual," his host, an emeritus professor of Russian history of some reputation, growled. "You know, there are those in Russia who've been known to call Dimitri Medvedev a _Lzhedimitrij_, too. Come on, just one cup, my friend."

Norton sighed. "Fine, Richard. One cup, and maybe just a sliver of this." He shifted a few books and set the foil-wrapped pie pan on the table. "Then I need to get on the road. Did you mean to leave your truck outside the garage?"

The historian scowled and waved a dismissive hand. "Crap, did I do that again? So little time left, so much misinformation to correct, and don't even _start_ me on Wikipedia…. I don't suppose I can persuade you to put it away for me? The Toyota's in the garage, right? I remember Sarah put the Toyota away on Wednesday when she brought me home from the dentist. Here, pick one."

Norton hated seeing the tremors in Richard's arthritic hand as he extended a small wicker basket of tea bags. Time was when he'd been quite the campus hellraiser, or so they said. "Peaches and cream," he said, selecting the appropriate flavor, "to harmonize with the pie. Sure, I can put it away for you. Is the key still on the—"

"Yes, the nail just inside the garage."

"You should keep that key inside, Richard."

_But thank God you don't._

"Ahh, it's a piece of shit, boy. Coughs up so much out the tailpipe, I'm perpetually surprised that it still passes emissions standards." The historian handed over the knife and server to Norton. "You do it. I'm not as steady as I once was. Sit down, sit down, damn it. And while we share our little repast I'll tell you what that clown in Cambridge has been saying about the late and unlamented Grigori Otrepiev. Shockingly, _shockingly_ shoddy scholarship, anything to raise a little bit of a stink, get some notice, some _ink_, as we pre-Internet fogies used to call it…."


	10. Default Position

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And motivation to post more chapters faster!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Ten**

**Default Position**

He thought that probably it was the evening of Tuesday, the eighteenth of May. He hoped he had figured that right. If he hadn't, he would be running out of sandwiches soon. They were disgustingly gooey things, peanut butter and honey on whole wheat—who in_ hell_ puts honey in peanut butter, anyway?—but hunger can make anything palatable.

He was currently in his bed wearing his scrubs, socks, and sweater, curled up under the covers with a pen and the legal pad, adding to his list of potential questions for the next time his captor showed up. His fifth bottle of water sat on the seat of the chair—he had removed the cushion and was using the chair as a bedside table—with his last carrot and two folded pages of notes he had made on Warden's photo collages.

Never before in his entire life had he spent more than a few hours away from the sight and sound of life, of other human beings, and now—he rubbed his jawline again experimentally—it had been at least three days.

Reading that prisoners go mad in solitary confinement is nothing to actually experiencing the excruciating reality of constant silence, with nothing but your own heartbeat and breathing for comfort. You awaken, you clear your throat, the sound bounces off the walls like thunder, because the acoustics of an all-metal room are like those of an eight-by-eight foot shower stall, and you jump. You panic at the sound of your own body. After hours of this, you begin to talk to yourself. To recite anything you can think of, from Shakespeare to nursery rhymes.

To read aloud from the American Bar Association's snore-inducing _Model Rules of Professional Conduct_.

To read aloud from the _Model Rules _in the voice and mannerisms of, say, Richard Burton. Or Jason Gideon. Or George W. Bush. Or Spencer Reid.

As foolish and demeaning as he'd first considered Warden's idiotic insistence on constant cleanliness, within a few hours he'd eagerly embraced it for no other reason than it gave him something to do. Shaving had been the first action that had demonstrated its usefulness. After thirty-some years of daily shaving a coarse and insistent beard, he could recognize his jaw after twelve hours and after twenty-four. Since Warden insisted it be clean-shaven, he had right there on his face a means for counting the days of his confinement.

Six times, his jaw had felt like half a day's growth. Six times he had shaved, and each time, he had made a tiny tick along the first page of Numbers in the trade-paperback-sized bible Warden had left him. He was pretty sure that it had been Saturday night when Warden left him. Even if he had calculated that incorrectly, it was something to build on.

So…Tuesday night.

Three days out of four—maybe eight—days until Warden returned.

His assignment was complete. It had taken longer than he had thought it might. He'd had to start two separate pages over, once because he'd left out a word, and the other because he'd become sloppy and his careful printing had devolved into his usual scribble. _Neat and legible, error-free_, Warden had wanted. Well, that was what he'd get. Aaron had always been fussy about having his homework done. Whatever the teachers asked for, that was what he gave them. Pleasing his teachers had always been far less complicated than trying to please his father.

Something else he'd done to keep his mind engaged and focused: He was memorizing the books of the Bible in order, something his childhood friends had accomplished about the time they hit puberty. He set aside his legal pad and began to name them aloud.

"Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, One and Two Samuel, One and Two Kings, One and Two Chronicles—crap, those four—and then Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah." And what the hell were those four he kept forgetting? Job was one, Esther another, Nehemiah and somebody else, but who, and in what order?

_Never mind. Don't get hung up on them. Move forward._

He took another sip of water, carefully replacing the cap on the bottle. "Jeremiah," he began again. "Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea." He'd worked out the mnemonic _Jerry laments Zeke's dandy hose_ for that grouping of five.

_Whine. Rattle._

His heart thundered.

_Warden planned four days and it's only been three_. He held his breath, praying that what he heard next would be not Warden's loafers, but the boots of an entire SWAT team.

Unfortunately, what he heard was the high-pitched squeal of Warden's hand truck.

_Default position_, he reminded himself. He'd designed a matrix of interpersonal choices he could display when his captor visited. Default position, or _pretend-Warden-is-well-wrapped_ position, was one of respect, compliance, and credulity. Against it, all other behaviors could be observed and measured.

He glanced around the room—he'd been cleaning as he went, something else that filled the hours and helped to discharge some of his rage—and he felt his captor would be reasonably satisfied with his housekeeping efforts. He'd made some small modifications to his living area, what little there was of it. It would be interesting and instructive to see how Warden reacted to them.

"Are you awake?" the precise voice called.

He stood up, squared his shoulders. Found his game face.

"I am."

Aaron turned to face the square window with the rod as it slid open. His captor wore a blue and tan plaid cotton shirt, jeans, and a denim jacket. The hand truck, which this time held only two boxes, stood at some distance from the door. The expression on the little dickwad's face seemed more one of curiosity than anything else. As before, he stood at least five or six feet beyond the window when he addressed Aaron.

"What's your name?"

_Here we go again…._

He managed to get through both the name thing and reciting those appalling paragraphs without incident. If the Team didn't find him soon, he'd eventually have to put up some kind of protest against them, but for now, he'd stay firmly in Default position.

"Your hands."

Hotchner presented his arms, accepted the handcuffs, and fastened them onto his wrists. He noticed that his so-called Warden watched his every move closely. He was an observant little guy, thoughtful and analytical.

_Oh, right. He profiled himself for me._

The keypads were tapped and the door opened. Warden entered and closed the door behind himself.

"Interesting move with the towel," he said, his voice neutral. Hotchner had fished the cords Warden had used on him originally out of the trash, and had strung them from a few of the hooks that protruded from the wall. One of the two shabby beach towels he had been given to dry his floor with, a bright yellow thing that featured a shark in sunglasses enjoying one of those foofy umbrella'd tropical drinks, now hung between the commode and the wall that had the door and window.

If Warden showed up while he was on the can, he would still have some privacy.

_OK, not completely Default position, but his rebellions were all tiny and defensible_.

Warden all but buzzed around the cell, shaking out the blankets, running his hand along the shelf and along the floor under the cot, peeking into the medicine cabinet. He glanced over the folded sheets of paper with a frown, then said, "Where is your assignment?"

"In the pages of _Faultlines: Innocence Projects and Their Fallout_," he replied. "The one on the shelf with the white cover, by—"

"I see it, Prisoner."

He heard his captor move to the shelf, heard the rustle of papers, and heard the creak of the leather lattice as Warden sat down on his bunk.

Aaron refused to allow himself to peek over his shoulder to see how Warden reacted to his assignment. He'd numbered each iteration that he had printed—his cursive writing was even hard for _him_ to decipher on occasion—and he had checked it over at least half a dozen times.

Part of him feared that his captor would expect him to recite the Act of Contrition as another indication that Warden was the aggrieved party and that he, Aaron, was confessing his sins and pleading for forgiveness. If he did make such a request, Hotch had already decided that he would have to give up on Default position. Warden might have the cell, the shackles, the Enforcer, but he was not and could not be a god, _all-good and deserving of all my love_, as the prayer put it.

Instead, Warden said, "How are the hygiene supplies working out for you?"

"Just fine, thank you," Aaron answered.

"What did you think of the shaving soap?"

He decided on honesty. "It's outstanding," he said. "I prefer it to the bath soap." And it was, it was great stuff. If it didn't smell like food, it would be perfect.

"Would you prefer to use it instead of the Dial, then?"

"Yes."

"Are you exercising regularly?"

_Oh, sure. I run fucking laps in here…._

"Situps, pushups, crunches," he replied._ Sometimes they're the only thing keeping me sane._

"And your bowels. Are they regular?"

For the space of a heartbeat, Hotchner's professional armor slipped and he was just a lonely and frightened man, robbed of his name, his loved ones, and his dignity, chained facing a wall while his tormenter interrogated him. His bowels were none of Warden's fucking _business_ was what they were, and he didn't even want to think about what kind of bright ideas the dickwad might have for regulating them.

Mentally, he scrambled for his professional distance again and found it. "No complaints," he replied, his voice even.

_There's something out there, beyond the shadows. Are those bars? Is that a cage?_ He moved his head slightly, the better to take advantage of the angle of a shadow. He wasn't sure. He wasn't even sure he wasn't imagining it.

_Might as well find out right away whether dickwad plays it straight, or he plays little dickwad games._

"May I speak?"

"Briefly."

_Always with that limitation._

_Control freak._

"Warden, when you give me permission to ask questions, do you—" _Phrase it right_. "Do you differentiate between major questions and minor questions?"

A lot of how he conducted himself in the future would depend on how Warden answered. The worst possible response, of course, would be to count even that question as one of his two questions, but Warden seemed genuinely to believe himself to be a fair and humane man. He knew that he possessed the lion's share of power, and he didn't seem inclined to play power games to prove his point.

_So far._

"If by major and minor, you mean simple queries about the necessities of life as opposed to the larger questions of why you are here, then certainly there's a difference. If you need to ask me for more toilet paper, I certainly won't count it as one of your questions."

Hotchner didn't even realize he had been holding his breath until he let it out. "Thank you."

"Any other—_minor_ questions?"

"Not at the moment."

"I would appreciate a little respect, Prisoner."

God. It was like dealing with his father, or a self-aggrandizing judge. "Not at the moment, sir," he corrected himself.

"I have a question for you," Warden said, his voice cheerful and enthusiastic. "Consider your answer carefully. What's the first thing you remember wanting to be when you grew up?"

_What the hell kind of question is that?_

After rapidly examining the question from all sides, he decided that, like his time and place of birth, it wasn't something worth confabulating about. "My mother tells me that I wanted to be a policeman," he said.

"Your mother? But what do _you_ remember?"

"I guess I wanted to be a policeman. The first thing I can _remember_ wanting to be was a race car driver."

"What was it about driving a race car that was so attractive?"

Hotch frowned, grateful that he was facing away from his interrogator. He knew the answer, but it sounded really dopey. "I-I don't recall, exactly."

"You're lying, Prisoner. You're lying, and it doesn't become you. Lying wins you no resources."

_Christ_. "The gear shift," he admitted with a sigh. "The gloves and the helmet and…the way the engine tone changed when they shifted gears."

"A little respect?"

"The gear shift, _sir_." He shifted his shoulders. "And now I do have a minor question, Warden, sir." (_OK, maybe you can back off a little on the sarcasm, Champ?)_

"And that would be?"

"What's _your_ first memory of what _you_ wanted to be?"

There was a gratifying silence, then Warden said, "Ah, but that's a major question, Prisoner. Do you really want to squander one of your two capital-Q questions on that?"

"Yes, sir."

There was another silence, and then Warden said, "I'm sure I thought about a lot of things, but the first I remember was this. Our parents took us to a circus, and there was a man in a silver suit and silver top hat who rode an elephant. I recall thinking that had to be a really cool life, going from city to city in a shiny silver suit and riding an elephant." Warden gave a little chuckle, then said, "I hope you feel that you spent your question wisely."

"Yes, sir," Hotch said, infusing the words with as much meekness as he could manage. "Yes, sir, I do."

_Game on, dickwad._

_You weren't an only child. You grew up with two parents, and you perceived yourself as living in a city, not a town or a place_.

"And now I have some things to accomplish here," Warden said. "While I'm engaged in that, you are to list all fifty states and their capitals, neatly and without errors. You can trade that for some extra resources."

"I'm chained to the wall."

"Don't be juvenile, Prisoner. Your cuffs will be removed."

**~ o ~**

The nice little man, the tidy little man in a suit and a bow tie, the little man from the Craigslist ads, beamed at her as he stood on the front steps of her townhouse. Eagerly, he presented her with an old-fashioned deep-fat fryer, round and fat and avocado green, like the one her mother-in-law had used.

She handed him some folded bills and he relinquished the deep-fat fryer into her arms. She carried it into the kitchen, set it down on the counter and opened the lid – to expose Aaron Hotchner's head, utterly hairless; even his eyelashes and eyebrows were missing.

She woke herself up screaming, and all her husband's sleepily murmured _Now, Erin, honey_s could do nothing to banish the horror. It took three tumblers of peppermint schnapps, warm, never mind the damn ice, before she could even return to the bedroom.

**~ o ~**

He wasn't sure which annoyed him more: the stupidity of the busy-work task, or the fact that he was having trouble carrying it out. He gave up trying to list the states in alphabetical order soon after he started. Instead, he started in the northwest corner, Washington, and mentally listed states as they appeared on the map as he envisioned it, and even then on his first try he came up missing two states (Utah and Minnesota).

_And what the hell is the capital of Vermont?_

He traveled all over the country regularly. He spoke to agents in field offices in state capitals all over the country on an almost daily basis. Why was this turning out to be so hard?

The purpose of this exercise, he recognized, was to demean him and to instill in him a sense of childlike powerlessness, inadequacy, and fear. Despite Warden's snarky _Don't be juvenile_ comment, that was exactly the condition he was trying to trigger in Hotchner.

_Montpelier, goddammit_.

He still had two state capitals left blank when the symphonic music stopped and he heard the rattle of a CD case, then Warden's voice caroled, "Time's up, Prisoner." The little window with the bar opened again. "Hands."

As neatly as he could, given his time constraints, he printed _Fargo_, then flipped to another page and wrote _Concord_. Then he set the papers aside and came to the window.

As he began to reach around the center rod, Warden said, "The other way this time, Prisoner. Face inward."

Hotchner turned around and tried to put his hands through the window. The position wouldn't be quite as comfortable as its reverse, because the window was located rather high on the wall, but he would be able to observe Warden's face. That would probably make the sacrifice in comfort worthwhile. Warden could also observe his face, but he had spent his professional life learning to school his features.

_I can do this._

This time, Warden pushed back the sleeves of Hotchner's sweater and fastened the cuffs himself, and he clipped them a little tighter than Aaron would have. Not painfully so, but the difference was noticeable.

The locks snicked, and Warden entered the cell, this time pushing his little hand truck in front of him. He parked it, set the brake (_like it's going to roll away?_) and shifted the upper box of two onto the cot. "That's for last time's completed assignment," he said, and he sat down on the bunk. "This is your current assignment? Good."

Holding the three sheets of paper some distance from his face (_far-sighted_, Aaron noted) he glanced down over the writing, then took a ballpoint from the breast pocket of his shirt and drew two small circles.

_He doesn't wear a wedding ring_.

"Fargo may be the largest city in the state," he said, "but the capital is Bismarck. And how did you manage, with all your education, to misspell Connecticut?"

There was no sense in protesting that he had spelled it correctly, that Warden had just read it wrong. He was supposed to have written neatly. And there was no freaking excuse for getting Bismarck wrong. He kept his face a mask.

_Show nothing. Feel nothing. Miss nothing_.

"Pity about the other resources," Warden said, his gaze drifting to the other box on the cart, his expression as blank as Aaron's. "Maybe you can win them next time."

"Maybe I can," Hotch echoed quietly. "Sir."

Warden leaned a negligent elbow on the box of resources. "I want to talk to you briefly about your assignment for next time. I'm asking you to list all of your teachers, K through 12, and everything that you can remember about each of them. That's the teachers, not what happened in the classes. Extra details will earn extra points." He got that smug little grin on his face. "And before you decide to invent details, think of what will happen if I quiz you on those details four years from now."

"Permission to speak?" Hotch blurted.

"Briefly."

Picking his words with infinite care, he said, "Warden, sir, I know that you've given a lot of thought to—to some aspects of, of this. I appreciate your planning, sir. But—have you given any thought to current research on the effects of solitary confinement?"

A sharp bark of laughter. "That sounds like a capital-Q question to me, Prisoner."

"No, I misspoke; I don't mean it as a question, Warden. I mean it as a statement." He looked directly into Warden's pale, and suddenly ice-cold, eyes. "Sir, I can survive four days, maybe four weeks, but even four months of solitary confinement will—"

"Enough," Warden said. "You have no idea what you can or cannot endure."

_Oh, yes, I do, Warden. Four years of solitary confinement would turn me—would turn anyone_—_into a vegetable. A gibbering wreck._

"Permission to—"

"Silence!" Warden rose to his feet and reached into the back pocket of his jeans for the Enforcer. "It's time for me to go."

"Please, sir," Hotchner said, keeping his voice low but steady, determined. "What about my second question?"

Warden's thumb hesitated on the power switch. "It'll cost you."

Aaron sighed. "What will it cost me?"

Warden gave that some thought. "Two hundred more repetitions of the Act of Contrition."

Aaron nodded. "Fair enough. I can do that." Sensing Warden's ambivalence, he added, "Sir. I can do that, sir."

The Enforcer was returned to Warden's pocket. "What's your question?"

"This place," Hotch said. "Who built it?"

Warden barely blinked. "White supremacists in the early nineteen-eighties," he replied. "And you've exhausted your good will with me today." He nodded at the box on the bed. "You have food and water and more toilet tissue. I'm leaving."

He opened the door, steered the hand truck out of the cell, and shut it behind him. When he came up to the window, he took one of Aaron's wrists in his fingers and said, "What's the capital of North Dakota?"

_Dickwad._

"Bismarck, sir," Aaron sighed.

The key turned in his cuffs. "Better."


	11. A Matter of Timing

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And they make us feel all warm and giggly, like maybe updating a little sooner!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Eleven**

**A Matter of Timing**

Glenna, the new kid on the second team, poked her narrow head into Morgan's office. "Sir," she said, her voice in that kind of controlled-quiet tone that rarely heralds good news, "you'll want to come to the conference room right away."

He gave her a quick, tight-lipped nod. It was late on Wednesday afternoon. Aaron Hotchner had been missing since Friday evening, and while there were a blue million slim leads, there was still nothing of substance.

_Calm down; this doesn't necessarily mean bad news in the Hotch mess._

_Could be another kind of bad news. Another 9/11-type attack. A presidential assassination attempt. A dumping ground with dozens of mutilated corpses. _

Prentiss, JJ, Reid, and a pair of evidence techs had preceded him to the room with the round table, but no images had been thrown up on the big screens. Instead, everyone stood quietly looking at a large white envelope on the table. It was a US Postal Service Flat Rate envelope, the kind you could stuff with any old thing and throw into outgoing mail. It was addressed via computer printed label to the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

The return address was 8723 Westbrook Heights, Arlington.

_Aaron Hotchner's address._

"Mailed out of Harrisburg early Monday morning," the elder of the two evidence techs said. "It isn't a bomb. They've already X-rayed it and checked for chemical evidence of explosives and, ah, organic decay."

"Anything show on the X-ray?"

"Watch, keys on a keychain, what appears to be a folding knife," the tech replied.

Everyone had gloves on, so Morgan pulled a pair from his own trouser pocket. Rossi and Garcia arrived while he was working them on over his fingers. He could feel everyone holding their breath.

_OK, so no bombs and probably no body parts._

He slit the envelope open to reveal a mass of torn and crumpled strips of newspaper. "_New York Times_," he announced. "February third of this year." He unfolded the packing material to display Aaron Hotchner's credentials, his billfold, a set of keys, a watch, a pocket knife, and a partially-emptied pack of spearmint Tic-Tacs.

He jerked his head at the evidence techs and they descended on the envelope and the strips of paper.

There were a few seconds of complete silence, then David Rossi said, "Well, that doesn't add up to 'he-sleeps-with-the-fishes,' does it?"

Reid, his gaze riveted to the table, said, "It's almost like someone's saying, 'he won't need these while he's here.' Wherever 'here' is."

"But that isn't his watch," Garcia said. "He wears a Seiko. That's a Timex Ironman."

"It's _one_ of his watches," Rossi told her. "He had—" He closed his eyes and bit his lip in consternation. "He _has_ three that I know of. He wears the Timex when we're working with the kids, with the soccer team. He usually wears the Seiko to work. He has a classic Rolex, too; I think it was his dad's. I've only seen him wear that two or three times."

"The Rolex and the Seiko were both at the house when we were there," Emily said, then she opened Hotchner's wallet with a gloved finger. "There are pictures missing," she said. "He carries a studio portrait of himself and Jack, and Jack's current preschool picture, right there beside his driver's license." She looked around her defensively. "OK, so I peeked when he paid the tab for the St. Pat's Day party. Tell me you wouldn't have done the same thing."

"So, what's the significance of that?" Morgan asked the team. "Is our UNSUB letting Hotch keep pictures of Jack with him? Or is Hotch maybe already dead, and the UNSUB's targeting his son?"

He heard someone say something that sounded like _We got prints_, then Prentiss repeated, "They have prints!"

_Yes 'Bout goddamn time we got some breaks here…._

**~ o ~**

He arbitrarily called his two shaves of the day "Noon" and "Midnight." Absolute accuracy was less important than consistency.

He was edging toward the midnight shave of what should be Wednesday, May 19, and doing a little resource management of his own, dividing his three bottles of fruit juice into six half-bottles, when the lights went out.

God _damn_.

_OK, then Warden has to be around, right?_

"Oh, come on," he roared at what he hoped was Warden's audio monitoring system. He thumped his fist against the wall. "Hey! You should be happy that I'm keeping track of this!"

He capped both bottles and groped around in the dark for the sweater he had hung over the back of the chair. He was adjusting to the temperatures in his cell now, and no longer felt the need to wear the sweater when he was under the covers, but he recalled how the last time Warden had shut off the lights the temperature had dipped perceptibly.

_Asshole. Dickwad. Loser._

Once he was bundled up and zipped, he helped himself to a sip of juice—cranberry-apple this time—and considered possibilities. He didn't want to get his hopes up, but … Warden might have cut the power if he sensed the authorities were coming his way, too.

The lights flickered back on for a few seconds. He reminded himself not to get his hopes up, not to get too invested in his interpretation of what was going on. Then they flickered back off again.

It was likely, he realized with a sigh, that the thing with the lights had nothing to do with either his activities or the approach of a rescue team. The bunker was supposedly way out in the boonies. Power out in the boonies could be an iffy thing.

He lay down, pulled the covers up over his head, and thought about Diana, wife of Warden. Diana, the blonde in the lime-green swimming suit with pandas frolicking across her tummy. Diana, whose somewhat plain features were made radiant by the goofy, troublemaker smile that she wore in four of the seven pictures he had been able to identify as hers. She seemed an odd match for the stiffly formal Warden.

And why were there no pictures of Warden? Unless he was somewhere in the random groups of small children at pools and picnics and parks of a bygone era, he was nowhere in evidence in the posted collages. Was he ashamed of himself? Was there something about his childhood and youth that he didn't want Aaron to know?

Or was it simpler than that? Maybe he was just the person who'd taken the pictures.

The lights flickered back on, dimmed, then returned to full power.

Aaron sat up, crosslegged, and reached for a legal pad. Among this time's "resources," there had been two more legal pads and four more pens, which probably meant there was a lot of writing in his future. For now, it meant that he could designate particular pads for particular purposes. The one that sat beside him day and night was the one he used for every kind of brainstorming and list-making.

He picked up a pen and flipped to _p3/requests_, where he added "matches, candles" to the list of things it couldn't hurt to ask Warden for.

His second resource box had been much like his first: water and fruit juices, toilet tissue, those terrible peanut butter and honey sandwiches, a scattering of apples and oranges, some bunny food and crackers. In addition to the extra legal pads and pens, Warden had included three Slim Jim beef jerky sticks, a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a pansy, and a packet of razor blades.

If Warden was crazy enough to trust Aaron around him while he was potentially armed with razor blades, then maybe he was crazy enough to trust him with some damn alternative light sources.

**~ o ~**

One last time before he turned in for the night, the man who had been born Norton Waldo Charpentier called up an astrology program on his laptop. Time was when he would have dismissed the whole sun-and-stars thing as worse than pseudo-science—and he knew that most public practitioners of the art were phonies and posers.

Then Eugene had come along, round-shouldered, Coke-bottle-glasses Eugene, a Mob minnow by profession and a recreational mathematician who was never without his pads of graph paper and his pencils of black and blue and red. He loved all numbers equally, including those that described the movements of the planets.

"Ya know, you're a natural communicator with a gift of gab," he had announced to Norton the second time they rubbed elbows at the prison breakfast table. "Your greatest gift is you can grab that opportunity that nobody else is seeing."

Norton had all but choked on his farina, because the description had been that of what could only be the anti-Norton. He had smiled politely, murmured, "Nah, I don't think so," and put it out of his mind.

"Seize the day," Eugene told him a week or so later. "Ya ain't taking advantage of the gifts the universe gives ya, man."

Norton knew exactly what he was. He was a timid, cringing blob with a prissy voice and zero people skills. He wasn't sure why Eugene had picked him to annoy, but he wasn't about to encourage him. He had turned away with a muttered, "Screw you."

"November 19, 1960? Elkton, Maryland?" Eugene had replied. "Around seventeen hundred hours? What, six minutes after your sister? Ringing any frickin' bells?"

Charpentier had glowered at the little jerk's accurate information. "Where'd you get those numbers?"

"I got my sources. That's you, right?" When Norton said nothing, Eugene had continued with his usual genial enthusiasm, "You got a Gemini ascendant, man. And Aquarius in your mid-heaven. You're all about communication and creativity. Why aren'tcha using it?"

_Communication and creativity_. Hell, if he'd had those, maybe he wouldn't have been such a total goddamn disappointment to his father, who'd expected to sire the next VP in charge of sales for the goddamn family company. Instead, his son had been, like Eugene, all about the numbers. Only with no people skills. No gift of gab. Certainly no noticeable creativity.

"Astrology is horseshit," he'd told Eugene flatly.

"Astrology is all about the tools the universe armed ya with when it sent ya into the world," the Mob minnow had retorted, obviously quoting from something he had read somewhere else. "Ya don't want to use it, that's your call, man. But you're missing out."

Norton's disbelief must have been written all over his face, because Eugene had pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. "Looky here," he had said, stabbing with one nicotine-stained finger at the circle he had drawn on the paper. "You're all back-chart, I can see that. You're all about keeping it in, keeping it back. I get it. But nobody's making ya stay there, man, is all I'm saying."

But his days of doubt were over. Now, he chuckled to himself as he pulled up a chart for the coming day.

Eugene had been right, and astrology had tickled Norton's own love of numbers and patterns. He could and did perform the calculations himself, but he also enjoyed the glitzy software he'd purchased that did everything for him, and then showed it all with bright graphics.

Tomorrow, Moon would be running barefoot all over Mars in Leo, his fourth house of home, heritage, and foundations. Sweet, sweet energies for getting some stuff accomplished around the apartment.

Leo was _Prisoner_'s seventh house of partners and lovers, and a bleak little house it was, too. Poor guy was all fore-chart, not much inner life to cling to.

Ah, well, that was Prisoner's problem, not Norton's.

Now, as to Prisoner's supporting cast: He used the standard 26 July 1908 birthdate for the FBI, the day Attorney General Bonaparte appointed the first agents. One of his contacts in American history had come up with an approximate time based on old journal entries. It wasn't exact, but it would do. There had been a huge traffic-jam in Cancer and Leo that day, anchored by the energies of that Retrograde Venus that always made Norton grin and picture J. Edgar Hoover in a dress.

He selected the relevant chart and clicked _Update_.

_Yes. _

Leo was the Bureau's ninth house. The next day should be a particularly interesting one for them, with hints of travel and foreign cultures and ethics.

**~ o ~**

Her name was Cherish Mottley. She had a dark complexion, perfect posture, intelligent, alert eyes, a heart-shaped face, and hair dyed gold and trimmed close to her scalp. She was 23 years old, a two-year veteran of the U.S. Army's military police. Her fingerprints were all over the February third _New York Times_ that had been used to wrap Aaron Hotchner's personal effects.

She appeared on the BAU conference room screen via webcam, because she was where she had been ever since her deployment in mid-March: on duty in Iraq.

"I'm sorry, sir," she told Morgan, her expression earnest. "I left New York on the third. I was visiting my aunt and my cousins. I'm sure I had a newspaper because I always buy a paper when I take the train, but I can't tell you what I did with it. I coulda left it in the station, or threw it away on a smoke break—there were two, Philly and Harrisburg—or when I changed trains at Pittsburgh. Or I maybe I took it all the way to Cleveland, or maybe I just left it on the seat or in the snack car. I don't recall."

Derek noticed that beside him, Spencer Reid was marking on one of his maps, drawing small green squares around New York City, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. A red triangle already showed up in Harrisburg, and a blue square in Cleveland.

_This is Furface's territory_, Morgan realized. _These are his stomping grounds_.

"Did you notice anything or anyone unusual on your trip?" he asked Mottley, more to be thorough than because he expected her to report an old guy with muttonchop whiskers stalking her through train terminals.

"It was real crowded," she said. "'Cause of the ice storm, you know? 'Cause nothing was flying out of there, not for a couple days."

He sent a digital laydown of eight computer-generated faces to her screen there in Iraq, eight faces that included Furface with his sidewhiskers and without them. "Any of these faces look familiar to you?"

She studied them carefully. "Nobody jumps out at me," she said. "Can't say I ever saw any of them before."

"Who picked you up in Cleveland?"

She blinked. "My boyfriend."

"What kind of vehicle does he drive?"

She blinked again. "White Denali."

"Do you know anyone who drives a blue Ford F-150 truck?"

"In Cleveland?"

Morgan sighed. "Anywhere."

She pursed her lips, shook her head. "Nah, not that I can think of. My dad has a truck, but it's a red Ram."

_Another strikeout—and it had felt so positive at first!_

**~ o ~**

It was Thursday, May 20, 2010, heading up toward the noon shave.

He fiddled with the hair at his temples—he hated the way it flip-flopped; he had used gel at his temples for years and years. Now it just…flopped there like the Nineties were back, and he had few happy memories of the Nineties, especially the early part, when he was still trying to figure out exactly how much of his father he had in him (answer: too much).

He took a sip of water, screwed the cap back on, and flung the bottle across to the opposite wall with all of his strength. It didn't help; he was shaking uncontrollably.

_He expects me to believe that I can survive here for five years, to believe that he'll just let me go, just…walk away, knowing who he is, as though nothing happened. Christ, I'd better figure out who he is! _

He ripped the top two pages off the legal pad, balled them up tight, and threw them across the cell, too, blinking back tears of fury and frustration.

_And Jack. Jesus, God, Jack. _

He gathered up the bedclothes in his arms and hugged them to his chest. "Jack," he moaned, his voice cracking. "Jack, don't give up on me, I'll get out of here as soon as I can…."


	12. No Dark Sarcasm

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And they make us feel all warm and giggly, like maybe updating a little sooner!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twelve**

**No Dark Sarcasm**

The wind rippled in the pale green chintz curtains, the ones with a scattering of red and yellow apples that covered the window above the kitchen sink. In the distance, a dog barked. He turned in his chair and watched his mother's hands. She was using the old mixer, the enormous metal one that she kept under the kitchen counter, the one she had to assemble every time she used it. She had to be baking a cake. She only used the big old mixer when she baked a cake.

He turned again and he saw Haley wearing that oversized pink sweater, the one that she called her _Flashdance_ sweater. She was licking chocolate batter off her forefinger almost seductively, her eyes fixed on his.

He felt profoundly relieved that she was alive. He stood up to cross the room to kiss her.

He tried to say _Hi, gorgeous_, but no sound emerged. He reached for her, smiling broadly, and tried again. _Hi, gorgeous_.

Still nothing.

As his hands closed on her upper arms, as his mouth hovered just inches above her own, he tried one last time.

"Hi—"

The sound of his own gravelly voice awakened him. Once again he was in the goddamn eight-by-eight cell, lying on his right side and staring at the locked door just a few feet away. He bit back a cry of despair, although he wasn't sure which part was more painful: that he was still a prisoner, or that Haley was still dead.

He sat upright, wrapping the bedclothes around him to ward off the chill.

All of his training, all of his years of working with victims of abductions, of hostages, of slaves—none of it prepared him for the constant dreams of freedom. He was no stranger to dreams that seemed to undo evil. He'd had plenty of them after Haley died—even a few after she left him—and he'd held Jack night after night when the boy awakened to find that his mom was still gone.

The worst dreams so far were the ones where the Team broke into the bunker and heat poured in through the door. Where Morgan, or sometimes Rossi, physically picked him up and carried him like a child out into the anteroom, where Emily was always cuffing the fucking Warden. It was always Emily in that role, and she was being none too gentle. Warden would look at him, sometimes with rage, sometimes with a silent pathetic plea on his face, and Morgan-or-Rossi would say _Forget that motherfucker, Hotch_.

It was, according to the clock of whiskers, somewhere between noon and midnight on Friday, May 21st. A full week had passed since Warden abducted him from his own garage in broad daylight. The last box of "resources" had included food for six days, and this concerned Aaron because only three days had gone by and yet he was finding it harder, rather than easier, to stay calm and patient, to let the Team do what they did best.

He cleaned. He did every exercise, both physical and mental, that he could recall. He read, he wrote, he analyzed. Sometimes, he prayed—badly, clumsily. Without any kind of confidence. He sang—a lot. He sang although his memory for lyrics was pretty feeble, and seemed to be unrelated to his musical preferences.

How else to explain that he'd gone blank a few lines into "Still Rock 'n' Roll to Me," but could sing every damn word of "Do That to Me One More Time"? That he stumbled through "Whip It" but never missed a beat of "Bette Davis Eyes"? That the only one of his favorite songs from his high school years that he seemed to nail perfectly was "Another Brick in the Wall"?

He drank some water, savored a few bites of a Slim Jim, and took another look at his attempt to fulfill Warden's stupid assignment to list all of his teachers. "We don't need no education," he sang softly, noting that Mrs. Bellman's husband had been his swimming coach at summer camp. "We don't need no thought control."

He tapped his pen furiously against the paper, still lost as to the name of his first chemistry teacher, the one who'd vanished so mysteriously mid-semester (not so mysteriously after all; he'd followed his estranged wife to Kentucky and tried to strangle her, although the truth took several months to filter down, in whispers, to the student body).

_Now what the hell was his name?_

Hotchner considered writing _Severus Snape_, then thought better of it. "No dark sarcasm in the classroom," he sang to himself. "Teachers, leave them kids alone."

Mr. Lutz.

_Got it._

**~ o ~**

He had a broad, warm smile that Derek Morgan desperately wanted to slap right off his warm square face. "Listen up, kids," he said. "I know none of you wants to hear what I say, but you don't have a choice, because you're professionals."

"Don't kill him," Rossi breathed in Derek's ear. "Leave him to me."

"I'm Hector," the visitor from the Hoover Building said, still smiling. "And my specialty is the art of creative thinking. And I'm here to brainstorm with you—because you're the Bureau's best resource when it comes to Aaron Hotchner—about how and why he might have chosen to drop out of sight. There are no wrong answers, people. This is all about brainstorming."

"About—Hotch deliberately arranging for somebody to kidnap him?" JJ's voice squeaked and her blue eyes were enormous.

"Fact is," Hector said, leaning in confidentially, "we're dealing in an interesting situation here, because somebody returned Agent Hotchner's creds, his watch, his keys—but they pulled the pictures of his little boy right out of there. Now, anyone have any bright ideas about why any UNSUB would keep those pictures?"

Emily Prentiss leaned forward, a dangerously friendly expression on her face. "Are you for real?"

"It's all about freeing yourself from finding what have to be the _right_ answers," Hector assured her. "About seeing options you're missing because they don't fit into your current mindset."

"We go chasing after the idea that Hotch faked his own abduction, and that's exactly where we'll end up," she retorted. "Free from the right answers."

"Agent Hobbes-Gutierrez," Erin Strauss said from her observer's seat in the far corner, "I can understand their reluctance to participate in this exercise. They've lived with the video of Aaron's abduction for a week. It's hard to believe that a man would willingly set himself up for that kind of abuse. Perhaps you can—"

"Please call me Hector, Erin," the agent said with a toothy grin. "We have no hard evidence that Agent Hotchner was genuinely shocked. He's seen enough people Tasered to know how to fake it. Not that he necessarily _did_, mind you—but it's a possibility that we have to address at some point, and better sooner than later, I always say. And I appreciate all of you dragging yourselves out of bed to join me on a Saturday morning—"

"No," David Rossi rumbled. "That's only you Hoover Building types who work a nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday week. We don't have that luxury. And if you weren't here, we'd be here anyway, working the evidence, following leads."

"Wait," said Spencer Reid, unexpected authority in his voice. "I see where you're leading us, Agent Hobbes-Gutierrez."

"Hector."

Reid's face showed nothing. "Agent," he repeated serenely. "If it's gonna satisfy some official administrative requirement for us to pretend that today's April Fool's Day, well, fine. I'm here to play, _Agent_."

Drawing a deep breath, Spencer said, "Let's consider that Agent Hotchner's love for his son is neither as deep nor as automatic as we've always observed. Let's presume, since we're spending our Saturday morning in the Twilight Zone, that having Jack was Haley's idea, that the whole pregnancy thing was a ruse to tighten her grip on Hotch, who'd have preferred to remain childless. Let's presume that, once he was free of having to fake the good-father thing for Haley, he felt free to give up the good-daddy pose and get rid of his undesirable family responsibilities."

Waves of negativity, of hostility, rose in the room but Reid seemed impervious to them. "Let's assume that he faked his abduction so that he could get out from under parenthood and the weight of his Bureau responsibilities. He has a girlfriend we know nothing about." He turned and smiled at each of his teammates in turn. "She lives in Michigan and he's gone to join her there."

"Michigan," Hector echoed encouragingly. "Interesting choice of locales. You see what kind of information we can derive from a simple relaxation of the rules of gotta-be-right? Whatever triggered your choice of Michigan for his destination, ah, Spencer? Or is it Spence?"

Reid returned neither his smile nor his enthusiasm. "Doctor," he said, his voice stony.

"Beg your pardon?"

"It's Doctor, _Agent_. And it's the point furthest west in the plot of our UNSUB's movements."

"Her name is Lenore," Rossi contributed, fiddling idly with his phone as he spoke. "She's tall, with long black hair. She has something to do with lions."

"A zookeeper," Reid suggested.

"Or a lion tamer," said Rossi. "Aaron was irresistibly drawn to her whip and chair."

Hector frowned. "Now you're not being serious," he said.

"But if there are no right or wrong answers, every suggestion is serious," Prentiss protested. "I'm down with Lenore the lion tamer. He met her at an ice skating rink in Seattle, before he came back to head the BAU unit. He kept a separate, prepaid phone to maintain contact with her, knowing that Garcia wouldn't be able to track their communications."

The visiting agent turned toward Rossi. "What suggested lions to you?" he asked.

Rossi shrugged, "Michigan. Detroit. Detroit Lions."

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm sure you are," Rossi said, his smile as broad as the creative-thinking specialist's. "It's a football team. The Detroit Lions."

"Ah." Hector frowned. "Too obvious," he said, shaking his head. "Too logical."

_Logic is suddenly something to avoid?_

"Fine, OK, I can play," Morgan said at last. "Long as we're wasting our time and, ah, yours, Agent Hobbes-Gutierrez."

"Hector, _please_."

"See, you can't get locked into heterosexuality, either, _Agent_," Morgan continued. "If Hotch is hiding shit from us, then there's no telling how much of what we think we know about him is wrong. I say this is no Lenore. This is some ripped pretty-boy from his secret days with the CIA, the ones he doesn't talk about."

"Interpol," Emily corrected. "Definitely Interpol."

Morgan raised an eyebrow at her. "And why?"

"Fewer rules. Greater latitude for—interesting motivations."

"And he's not ripped," JJ contributed grimly. "He's a short little thing, a professional Charles Manson impersonator in Vegas. They met when they were playing in the same Aerosmith tribute band."

Agent Hobbes-Gutierrez's lip twitched with what might have been dismay.

It was the first thing Morgan had enjoyed all morning.

**~ o ~**

Since it was a lovely Sun-in-Gemini evening, he decided to sling the canvas bag of Prisoner's foodstuffs over his shoulder and hike the mile-and-a-half of switchbacking paths that led from the stables to the cavern where the entrance to the bunker was concealed.

One thing that frustrated him was the fact that Prisoner seemed genuinely unable to place him. He knew that he'd changed, both physically and personally, in the seventeen years since they'd first taken each other's measure in Baltimore. OK, so he'd dropped a few pounds and picked up some people skills—but you'd think that the whole conspiracy-to-convict-an-innocent-man thing would raise some alarms.

Surely, he couldn't have screwed over _that many_ defendants, could he? He'd have been caught, right? The Bar Association would have disciplined him, said, _oh, dear, you've been a naughty, naughty boy_, rapped his knuckles, sent him to bed without dessert, or some similar maddeningly meaningless punishment. _Censure_ or something. You'd think, though—wouldn't you?—that if he'd made it a habit, the FBI would have wanted no part of him, right?

By the time he got down that wretched, wobbly elevator, he was in no mood to be civil.

He shoved the gate open and called, "Are you awake?"

"Does it matter?" the dark baritone called back.

_Okie-dokie. Somebody else isn't in the mood to be civil, either._

Norton dropped the canvas bag in the storage area and moved over in front of the cell, which sat along the far wall of a much larger room. The survivalists and supremacists who had first taken advantage of this location had obviously had much grander plans than two steel cells and that long cage-thing, whatever they'd meant it to be, along the far left edge of the room. Some day, he hoped to find more documentation than the little he had discovered already.

He slipped the latch on the square window, to the right of the door on his side, the left of the door on Prisoner's side, the window with the red steel rod running down its middle.

Whereas previously he had risen to greet his captor, this evening Prisoner sat on his cot, one knee up, with a water bottle in his fingers. His cot was made up. He wore his sweater and had an extra blanket folded loosely beside him. He was using the cushion for the chair as an extra pillow, and the chair as some sort of table. He looked through the window at Norton with a combination of caution and curiosity.

"What's your name?" Norton asked him.

He barely blinked. "Prisoner, sir."

"And mine?"

He shook his head. "I have no idea," he replied, his tone calm, thoughtful. "I know I'm to call you Warden, and I also know I should recognize you. But I don't."

"That wasn't the answer I wanted."

Prisoner nodded. "Then my answer is, 'Warden, sir.'"

"Your statements."

The man sighed and shifted positions slightly, then read the paragraphs printed on his walls in a low monotone. He seemed no closer to identifying with the text than he had been when Norton had first dragged him in.

_This will be a longer haul than I'd anticipated._

"What was the first federal prosecution you participated in?" Norton asked him.

Prisoner gave him a what's-the-catch look, but replied, "Jurek, Wilhousky, et al."

"Your second?"

"Wassermann, Sinclair, et al."

"Your third?"

Prisoner unscrewed the cap of his water bottle. "Ianotti, Bianchi, et al."

"Your fourth?"

A long sip of water. "Kelly, Sterman, et al."

"How many prosecutions did you participate in before you joined the FBI?"

Prisoner blinked. "Fifteen."

"And on how many were you lead counsel?"

"The last nine. Jaffee, Benson, et al., was my first lead." His face appeared relaxed, but it was clear to Norton that his captive was studying him closely.

Warden produced the handcuffs from his pocket. "Arms out."

Prisoner stood up and approached the window warily. "Which way?" he asked.

"The usual way," Norton said. "Forward." He held the handcuffs where the lawyer could reach them and watched as the man fastened them onto his wrists. He noticed that Prisoner made sure that he could see that they had clicked into place securely.

Prisoner frowned at the cuffs for a moment, then said, "Permission to speak?"

"Briefly." _What is your game, lawyer?_

"Sir, if it's all the same to you, I think I would prefer to face the other way." His gaze drifted up from his wrists to Norton's eyes, but he said nothing further.

Obviously, the lawyer believed that whatever intelligence he derived from studying Norton's features would be well worth the additional awkwardness and heightened sense of vulnerability of that position.

_Do you think I didn't learn all about keeping my expression blank during those five years in prison?_

He took the key from the pocket of his khakis and unfastened the cuffs. "Turn around."

**~ o ~**

Jesus Christ, it was almost midnight!

In the privacy of his office, Rossi kept looking at the same words, over and over. The same matrices, as printed out from the threat assessment software used by the Bureau, as drawn in Morgan's rapid Sharpie strokes on a legal pad, and as sketched with Reid's pencil on the back of a restaurant place mat.

Purpose taken: to kill, as a hostage, to interrogate, to punish BAU/Bureau

Outcome: Dead.

Dead attempting to escape, dead under torture, dead because he wouldn't cooperate.

Given eight days gone, no demands and no boasting from the UNSUB, the only reasonable interpretations were that Hotch was dead or (distantly) that he was being interrogated.

_And what would anyone interrogate him about? _That was the critical question, then. The BAU maintained no state secrets.

Yeah, there was that outlier possibility, what Rossi now called the "Hector Factor," that Aaron had arranged the whole thing so he could get free of a cloying family, a child he was unable or unwilling to care for. Aaron skipping out from under his responsibilities, maybe to set up housekeeping with a foxy blackjack dealer, a femme fatale from the Mossad. A pretty boy from law school.

A lion tamer.

The "Hector Factor" had to be there—the outcomes matrix demanded that all possibilities be accounted for—but if Aaron had done anything like that, then he wasn't Aaron anymore. Not the Aaron they knew and loved, or at least respected, anyway. Aliens had stolen his brain.

Case closed.

_Dead._

He poured himself another drink and stared morosely into the shadows.


	13. Game On

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And they make us feel all warm and giggly, like maybe updating a little sooner!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirteen**

**Game On**

When Warden entered his cell, shoving his little hand truck in front of him, he laid two boxes on the bed, and left an additional box on the dolly. That was potentially good news. Any new object, any new food item, had potential promise. And not just because there was the chance of discovering something that would be useful in escape, or in learning something valuable about Warden—any new thing also provided a few minutes' relief from the agonizing boredom of captivity.

Also, interestingly, he didn't see Warden's Enforcer protruding from his back pocket.

"Your assignments are in the same place as before? In _Faultlines_?"

"Yes."

He'd expected Warden to inspect the cell first, but instead he reached for the book on the shelf above the sink, brought it down and laid it on his lap as he sat on the bed beside the two boxes.

He unfolded the pages carefully and scanned them, a thoughtful look on his face. "Error on page four," he said after a moment. "failure to capitalize Thy. In two—no, three places. Looks like you'll have to re-do your Act of Contrition assignment, Prisoner. Oh, and here's another one. Traditionally, the pronouns that relate to the name of the Deity are capitalized, as you can see if you consult the original I supplied for you."

He looked up with a bland, pleasant smile on his face. "Before I leave, you will rewrite this assignment completely, legibly, and without error, or when I leave, I take these boxes with me." He patted the cartons with what seemed like affection.

"Now, as to the other assignment—" He opened the second set of folded pages and studied them in silence. "It was Lusk, Prisoner. _Lusk_. Not Lutz. Herman James Lusk. Think of Jack the Ripper and his 'From Hell, Mr. Lusk' communication."

So far, Aaron had managed to keep his own face expressionless, even through the nursery-school shaming tone Warden had taken about his errors. But this—this took his breath away. It hadn't occurred to him that the little dickwad already knew who Aaron's teachers had been. He struggled to keep the professional mask up, but it was hard.

_Damn_, it was hard.

"Burning Hills Country Day School," Warden said, pronouncing each word with relish. "Class of '82, graduated a year early, didn't you?" He beamed at Aaron. "Such an ambitious boy—those dark, angry eyes and that girly '80s hair. One might even say _driven_."

_Christ, does he have my senior picture?_

"What do you want from me?" he rasped.

Warden's gaze was cold. "You don't have permission to speak."

"Fine," Hotchner replied. "May I speak, Warden, please?" He didn't even try to keep the anger and the resentment from his voice or his features because the only critical item left on his agenda was to disguise the extent of his desperation.

"You may not." Warden refolded the assignment sheets and tucked them into the pocket of his jacket. "Your next assignment is to list all 72 members of your class in alphabetical order. You'll probably want to make notes before you do that. It's fortunate that you were a young man of privilege, one who attended such an _exclusive_ school. Even with a splendid memory like yours—and it is outstanding—can you imagine recreating a graduating class of 520, like mine?"

_He does. The sonofabitch has my yearbook!_

_And he went to a large urban school, probably Catholic. Why else the obsession with the Act of Contrition?_

He forced himself to find a polite smile. "Was that a question, sir?"

Warden was unamused. He reached over with his right hand and withdrew the Enforcer from the carton next to him. "How difficult will this be?" he asked. "And that, too, was rhetorical, Prisoner." He thumbed the power button on and off twice, almost idly. "So—for next time, the list of your classmates. For today, while I'm working, you will present me with a fresh, error-free 200 repetitions of the Act of Contrition." He rose up on one flank and stuck the Enforcer in his back pocket. "And now, let's check on your housekeeping."

He watched Warden bustle around the cell, collecting empty water bottles in one of the empty cardboard cartons, checking for dust on the shelf, under the sink and the bed.

Once satisfied (or maybe disappointed; it was hard to read him), he turned his attention to Hotchner. He looked him over head to toe, even unzipped his sweater, examined his scrubs, _sniffed_ him as if in search of offensive body odors.

He ached to ask Warden, _Do you do that to your wife? Do you sniff her for potential evidence of infidelity?_

Part of his problem was that Warden simply didn't present as a married man. Was it possible, Aaron wondered, that Warden adored Diana from a distance? That he was a stalker, rather than a husband? That might explain why there were no photos of the two together, not even in Diana's blissful soft-focus late pregnancy portrait, or the one where she sat up, tired but glowing, in a hospital bed, holding a newborn in a pink receiving blanket.

_Maybe your mind is the only place she's your wife_, he thought as Warden studied Aaron's ears, his hair, with narrowed eyes. _No self-respecting woman would ever tolerate the level of control that you need to have over people._

Again, Warden opened his sweater and inspected the scrubs. "When was the last time you laundered these?" he asked.

Hotch knew the answer—that very morning, some time between midnight and noon of May 22, 2010. A Saturday. Day Nine in this cell. "Not long ago," he replied carefully. "Probably within the last day or so. I have no dependable way of calculating time or date."

"Liar," his captor said, but he didn't follow it up with a challenge.

Warden tugged on the scrubs hard enough that Aaron was almost ready to reassess his take on the little man and decide he was a sexual sadist after all, when Warden abruptly plunged his hand into the left-hand pocket of his pants.

_Oh. Crap._

"And what's this?" he said, withdrawing the three sheets of legal paper that Hotch had folded into a tight square. "Your version of _Letter from a Birmingham Jail_? A list of ways you plan to wreak your revenge on me? Maybe a bit of D-I-Y porn to help you beat off when frustration creeps up on you?"

_Calm down, Slick. Use this. Wasn't he just asking you about these very names?_

He located his Aaron-fucking-Hotchner game face. "No, sir," he replied in his best deferential courtroom manner. Voice soft. Dignified, his posture reflecting as much control as any man can manage when his hands are cuffed to the wall behind him.

Warden obviously expected him to say more, but he resisted the temptation to explain away what he had been writing.

Warden seated himself on the cot again and slowly unfolded the yellow lined legal paper. He frowned for an instant, then turned it sideways, then frowned again. Getting it rotated the right way helped some, but Hotchner's notoriously awful handwriting seemed to baffle him. His brow furrowed, he studied the sheets.

And then he inhaled sharply.

Hotchner's heart thudded and he memorized the exact location on the sheet where Warden's eyes had rested when he—_figured it out_.

"Interesting mental exercise," Warden said, his own voice as even and bland as Aaron's, but his eyes and nose giving him away, his pupils dilated, his nostrils flared. He refolded the sheets and put them in his pocket with Aaron's assignments. "I'll leave the one box here for you and you can put things away. The other—well, that can wait until you've completed a legible and error-free version of those Act of Contrition repetitions you agreed to write for me. You do recall agreeing to do them for me on my previous visit, correct? In exchange for asking me another question?"

Hotch nodded and murmured, "Yes, sir."

_The far right side of the sheet, he was looking at the far right side of the sheet, so it's one of __those three cases. God, thank God, there's progress_, he thought, so grateful to have any kind of idea where to look that Warden could have assigned him another thousand repetitions and he would have accepted them gladly.

_I will identify you._

_You loser, you pathetic stalker of other men's wives…. _

He watched as Warden lifted one carton back onto his little hand truck, watched him engage his little magnet toy on the door, watched him saunter out with his fussy little gait, watched him close the door.

In his efforts to figure out where Warden had met him, Aaron had made five columns each on three sheets of paper, each column representing one of the cases he had participated in when he was at the Department of Justice. He'd occupied himself part of his time beginning to fill in names of lawyers, defendants, witnesses—anyone he could think of from each case. It was a harder job than it might seem. Most of those prosecutions had been huge, tangled things with a dozen or so defendants, five or six lawyers, and long witness lists.

But some name on a far right column of one page had made Warden gasp. That narrowed it to three cases.

He was on to something, and he could easily recreate what he had written, what Warden had taken away.

When Warden released him from his cuffs, Aaron actually smiled at him.

_Game on, Dickwad._

**~ o ~**

"I don't know how long Strauss will let us put one hundred percent into Hotch," Emily Prentiss sighed, sinking deep into Penelope Garcia's purple beanbag chair. "I know she wants to keep our assets focused on him, and what's happened to him, but—if something big comes up I don't think she'll be able to keep justifying it."

"Beer, white wine, or Diet Pepsi?" her hostess inquired, apparently unfazed that she had a half-drunk profiler calling on her at three o'clock on a Sunday morning. "I recommend the Diet Pepsi."

"Nothing diet," Emily said. "But you're right, nothing alcoholic either. What I need is a milkshake or something."

"Done," Garcia said, and popped to her feet. "I have chocolate mint ice cream and a blender. How was the brainstorming session?"

"Oh, my God, what a total buffoon," Prentiss groaned, closing her eyes, leaning back, and hoping the room would stop spinning. "He even pissed off Strauss. 'Call me Hector, Erin.' I thought she was gonna throw up."

"Really?" Garcia called from the kitchen. "Kevin went to one of his seminars and said it really freed him up from locking himself into expectations. This Hector guy's supposed to be an expert at freeing up your mind for problem-solving. "

"In what universe would that be happening? Honestly, Rossi started spinning this story about how Hotch ran off with this lady lion tamer from Michigan, and Agent Moron is just leading him on, all excited that he's thinking outside the box—"

The blender whined for a minute or so, then Garcia reentered the room with a tall glass of something thick and pale green. "Here," she said. "A lion tamer? Really?"

Prentiss's eyes flew open. "I notice that you don't seem surprised at the idea that Hotch ran off, just that he ran off with a lion tamer."

"Of course not," Penelope said. "Take it. Drink it. Sober up, girlfriend. It's an outlier. You have to look at every conceivable possibility, even the crazy ones."

"You saw the video. What do you think? Was that a man faking his own abduction so he could go—oh, I don't know—do a Gideon? Just run away from who he is, what he does, never mind his own son?"

Garcia perched on the arm of the couch. "Do I believe there's a mathematically significant chance that he faked that? Of course not! But it is it impossible? We see the impossible every day in this job." She gazed with troubled eyes at Emily. "But I'd rather waste time, you know, engaging in stupid speculation than giving up hope."

Emily's chin jutted upward. "Nobody's giving up hope."

"Rossi is. You can tell just by looking at him. It's ripping him apart."

"No way."

Garcia twisted a kitchen towel in her hands. "It's true. He looks like he's ready to retire. Or just…fade out. It's kinda sad."

**~ o ~**

The former Norton Charpentier tried to open the cabinet quietly. Neither of the Hawthornes slept well or deeply, and he had no desire to interfere with the elderly couple's slumbers at nearly four in the morning.

He was in their office, which they persistently called Ted's office, although Bren's books on the history of organized labor lined the shelves and her desktop computer took up half the east wall. The only evidence that Ted had anything to do with the room was a glass-fronted bookcase of mechanical engineering textbooks to which he'd contributed either chapters or editorial services. The rest of the room was an explosion of Civil War reenactment minutiae.

Norton thought that he was moving noiselessly, so when the light in the hall clicked on, he was startled. "It's just me," he called out softly, not wanting to awaken whichever Hawthorne was still in bed.

"I know," Bren's voice whispered back. "Heard your car way back before midnight, wondered when you were planning to show your face."

"I just came in to make some copies," he told her. "Do you have any white legal-sized paper? All I can find is—"

"That pastel stuff from the spring edition of the newsletter," Bren finished with a light laugh. "Sorry, Sarge, but that's all we've got."

"I don't mind it," Norton assured her, "but I didn't want to run you short if you had plans for it later."

Mrs. Hawthorne appeared in the doorway in flowered pajamas and bare feet. "What's got you up and making copies in the middle of the night?"

Norton indicated the sheet of lined legal-sized paper he was smoothing on the aged copier. "I'm in the middle of a little mystery," he said, "and I want to make notes, but I don't want to mark on the originals."

"Goody," said Bren. "I love a mystery."

"No, no—not that kind of mystery." The last thing he needed was the Hawthornes taking any interest in some of his activities in the area. They were sweet people; too sweet to get mixed up, even tangentially, in his project. "I'm just trying to decipher some notes that somebody else made." The copier spat out three copies of the relevant page, page one, of Prisoner's notes, one in pink, one in yellow, and one in baby blue. He looked at the other two sheets and he almost passed on copying them, but in the end he decided to make three copies of each of them, too.

"Cheese and crackers," Bren said, leaning over the table and turning the original of page three so the writing faced her. "You can read these chicken-scratches?"

"Just barely," he laughed. "That's why I want extra copies to make notes on."

She shook her head in sympathy. "Well, I'm about to make myself a cup of hot chocolate. You want something while I'm up?"

"No, thanks, Bren, I—crap," he finished as one page seized up in the rollers and the whole printer shuddered to a halt. "One of these days I have to bring you guys a printer from the Twenty-first century."

"We wouldn't use it, honey," Bren said with a sigh. "That thing may be old and cranky but it's sure cheap to run. Those new machines, they run you a fortune in ink supplies. You sure you don't want some hot chocolate?"

"Positive, thank you," he told her, and watched her fondly as she headed back down the hall toward the kitchen.

**~ o ~**

He was pretty sure that it was around noon on Sunday, May 23rd, his tenth day in the cell. His left wrist, hand, and fingers ached ferociously, but he had all 200 copies of the damned Act of Contrition written out and error-free—he had checked them over obsessively—and as legibly printed as he could manage. He set the sheets out in the open on the seat of the chair, on top of the pad he used for note-taking.

There had been some surprises among the resources in the one box Warden had left behind. In addition to the endless supply of peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches, the assortment of fruits and vegetables, there were three more Slim Jims, several snack packs of cheese and crackers, and a six-pack of chocolate pudding cups and a plastic spoon.

Oh, and four more legal pads and an entire ten-pack of Papermate Write Bros ballpoints. Lots more writing in his future, it seemed.

But that was fine.

Whoever the hell Warden was, somebody, probably more than one somebody—whom Aaron had listed as having played some part in his fifth, his tenth, or his fifteenth prosecution—was a familiar enough name that it had made Warden gasp, had made his eyes widen slightly.

_Whine. Rattle._

_And I haven't shaved._

He glanced around and assured himself that his cell was in order, then deliberately walked over to the sink and collected his soap and razor. He was so angry, so stoked, that he wasn't sure he could shave without ripping his jaw to shreds, but he suspected that Warden would interrupt him. He couldn't finish the job if he was cuffed to the window, anyway.

He ran water, worked up some suds with the key-lime-scented shaving soap, and began to work the lather onto his cheeks.

"Are you awake?"

_Someday I should say No, just to see what happens._

"Yes," he called back.

He heard the latch slip on the square window.

"You can finish that later," Warden said.

_Nailed that one._

He rinsed his face and dried it, then turned to his captor. He wondered whether the man had a bolthole of his own where he could nap.

_No. He's changed his clothes, just like the first time! Either he lied and he lives close to here or he's prepared to live out of his car when he's in the area,_ he decided.

"Hands," Warden said. "Facing inward."

When the process was over, when he was facing Warden, seated on the cot with his trusty hand truck and its two extra boxes of resources beside him, he said, "Permission to speak?"

"No."

Warden shuffled slowly through Aaron's second attempt at completing the assignment correctly and nodded. "Better," he said. Then he caught sight of the top sheet of the legal pad. "'Page three, requests,'" he read aloud. "What happened to pages one and two?"

Another of those questions about which there was no reason to lie. "I threw them away," Hotch replied evenly. "They're in the waste basket."

"A second set of scrubs? 'Scrubs'? That's your uniform, Prisoner." Warden looked up at him. "You have a problem with it?"

"It would be useful to have a second...uniform to wear while the originals are drying."

"'Useful'?"

"Nice," Hotch conceded. "Yes. Useful, too. Even if I keep ironing them so they dry faster, it's hard to do that when you're wrapped in a sheet like a toga."

"A clock? Really?"

"Really."

"Do you think it'll make your time pass any more quickly?"

"Honestly? No," he replied, then added, "I mean, no, Warden. But I have to calculate how long it is from day to day so I don't run out of food and water."

Warden raised an eyebrow. "Matches? Candles?"

"The power went out for a while the other day," Aaron said, trying to look earnest and honest. "Or night."

"And—you're afraid of the dark?"

He decided not to answer that one. He just stood there, waiting for Warden to tire of his little game.

"The answer to all of the above is 'No,'" Warden told him with one of his smirks. "Although I'll keep them in mind for rewards as time passes."

"Technically, sir," he said, weighing his words carefully, "I didn't plan to show you that list or to make any of those requests at this time. I hope you won't count that toward my two questions."

"So you have no requests?"

_OK, Slick. Now or never._

"I have one request."

Warden's lip twitched. "I'll just bet you do," he said cheerily. "Go ahead. It'll count as one of your questions, however." The smirk grew to a grin. "And I'm always more interested when I'm addressed with respect."

Internally, Aaron thought, _Someday, I will kill you. I'm living for two things only: Jack, and the moment I beat the life out of you._

What he said was, "As a prisoner, sir, I request the right to communicate by mail with my loved ones."

"Do you understand why you don't have that privilege? And it's a privilege, Prisoner, not a right."

Hotchner didn't return the man's smile. "No, I don't understand why. And it's a right."

"It's a privilege, Prisoner," the little man snapped. "Superseded by your right—which I did _not_ have, by the way—to be free from the fear of being abused, beaten, and molested by brutal career-criminal inmates and sadistic, borderline-personality guards."

Hotch's professional mask slipped away completely and he had no interest in trying to recover it. "And _you don't call this abuse_?" he blazed. "Enforced solitary confinement, having to watch every goddamn word because you're the one with the cattle prod? Punished because of _poor penmanship_? You don't think maybe I'd rather take my chances on a fair fight in the shower than live like this? What fucking planet do you live on, _Warden_?"

"Says the man whose concept of legal ethics is so fluid or slipshod that he sent an innocent man to prison for almost five years," Warden snarled, rising to his feet. "The man who cost me everything I ever loved, ever cared about, and paid nothing—_nothing_—for his crimes."

Aaron ignored him. "My second question," he said, his tone just barely civil, "is, 'How's your wife, Warden?'"

And as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew he'd made a grave tactical error. He'd read the signs completely wrong. Warden looked utterly stricken, and the pain that glistened in his eyes wasn't that of a man in love with a woman who could never be his. It went much deeper.

_Oh, God, oh God: She really was his wife, and she left him. _

"I'm sorry," he said, and he meant it. Motivated less by fear of punishment than by the look of bleak despair on his captor's face, so reminiscent of the way he'd felt when Haley walked out on him, he pleaded, "I'm sorry, Warden. I was completely out of line."

"And this is the difference between me and your standard prison guard," the little man said softly. "If I were to act on my emotions, I would pick up that chair and keep beating you with it until it turned to splinters in my hands."

His quiet response frightened Hotchner more than rage might have. "Please believe me, I'm sorry that I said that," he whispered.

Warden released the foot brake on the hand truck. "I suspect that you'll understand why I'm not inclined to give you anything but the most basic necessities at the moment," he said, his voice hushed, rigidly controlled.

"Yes, sir."

Warden tried for a small smile and failed. "Then let's both look on the bright side of this," he said gently. "In the end, this will work for good. A humbled prisoner is one who's on the road to becoming a penitent prisoner."

He reached into the top carton and extracted something square wrapped in a plastic bag, and a small paper bag. These he left on the cot.

"My absence this time will be longer than my previous ones," he told Hotch in a dispirited tone. "And that is unrelated to anything that happened here."

Hotchner stood motionless as Warden nodded faintly and left the cell. As his hands were uncuffed. As he heard Warden's unusually slow, plodding progress back toward the elevator.

_A humbled prisoner is one who's on the road to…aw, Christ._

_And I'm already showing the first signs of Stockholm Syndrome._


	14. Tactical Shifts

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input!

**A/N 3: Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And they make us feel all warm and giggly, like maybe updating a little sooner!**

**I'm (Kitty) going out of town, so next update will be Friday night!**

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Fourteen**

**Tactical Shifts**

Derek Morgan scowled as his desk phone rang. His head throbbed from lack of sleep and frustration, his stomach was knotted like an old rag, and he seriously wanted to punch something—or someone—out. Nearly two weeks had passed and there still wasn't a shred of significant progress on finding Hotchner. Sure, they'd had a few good leads, but nothing had panned out.

_We don't even know if he's dead or alive, dammit!_

The phone continued to ring insistently. Morgan wanted to ignore it, knowing any of the Team would've called him on his cell if they had news about Hotch, but there was always a chance it was some outside law enforcement agency calling. And of course, it could be something to do with a new case. Unfortunately, crime hadn't stopped just because his friend and boss had been abducted.

He scooped up the receiver and growled, "Morgan."

"Agent Morgan."

Oh God, it was Strauss, sounding disgustingly refreshed and in control. He tried to push all emotion out of his voice. "Yes, ma'am?"

"I'd like you and Agent Rossi to come to my office. Now, please."

_'Please,' my ass._ He knew an order when he heard one. He also knew he had a job to do, and spending time in Strauss's office when Hotch was still out there somewhere, in God knows what condition, counting on them, wondering why they hadn't found him yet...well, it galled him. He had no choice, though, so he said, "Yes, ma'am, I'll get him and we'll be right there."

"Thank you," Strauss said drily, and hung up.

Morgan forced himself to place the receiver down gently. "No, thank _you_," he muttered, and headed out in search of Rossi.

The senior profiler spent little time in his own office, and sure enough, it was empty when Morgan poked his head inside. On a hunch, he walked back to the conference room and sure enough, Rossi was there alone, reclining dangerously far back in one of the office chairs, eyes closed, his fingers laced behind his head. A steaming cup of coffee sat on the table beside him, a whiteboard covered with photos, notes, and diagrams nearby.

"Morning, Morgan," Rossi called out softly, eyes still closed.

"Morning, Rossi. Didn't realize you had eyes in the back of your head," he said, chuckling.

Rossi swung around in his chair, opened his eyes, and grinned. "With Hotch gone, you're the only other male likely to come in here this time of day. Well, there's Reid, but he wears those soft-soled shoes. And it isn't hard to tell your step from the ladies'."

"I hope not," Morgan said, smiling, but the smile fell quickly away. "Hate to do this to you, my friend, but Strauss wants to see us both in her office. You can probably guess why."

Rossi took a quick gulp of his coffee, then got to his feet. "Yeah, but let's hope we're both wrong."

Wordlessly the two men descended the stairs and made their way to Section Chief Strauss's office.

Alita, her assistant, waved them through with a smile. "Go on in, agents. She's expecting you."

Morgan knocked once, to be polite, then opened the door to Strauss's inner office and went in, Rossi on his heels.

Strauss pushed aside a small pile of paperwork, removed her glasses. "Take a seat, agents."

"Ma'am, if you don't mind, I'd rather—" Morgan began, but Strauss cut him off.

"Sit _down_, please, Agent Morgan, and you too, David."

Morgan exchanged a quick glance with Rossi. Did Strauss know something about Aaron's case that they didn't?

"All right," she said abruptly. "No sense in beating around the bush here. It's been two weeks since Agent Hotchner was abducted. Your team, and indeed almost everyone in the entire unit, has been working nearly non-stop since that time to locate him."

"Ma'am—" Morgan said, but again Strauss refused to let him speak.

"Just a moment, Agent Morgan," she said, sitting upright in her chair. "Let me finish, please."

It took all Morgan's self-control, but he managed a respectful nod.

"In the two weeks Agent Hotchner's been missing, we've had no contact from his abductors, no sightings of him, and, thankfully, have found no body. We've worked with dozens of other agencies. and every law enforcement officer from Maine to Key West is on the lookout for Aaron." She studied each man's face in turn. "And nothing. It's as if—well, I hate clichés, but it's as if he disappeared into thin air. Meanwhile, other cases have been coming in. As much as I would like to focus exclusively on finding Aaron and bringing him back, protocol requires that I order you to stand down from his case and move on to others. The second unit will continue to follow up any leads that come in on Agent Hotchner."

In an instant Morgan was on his feet, flushed with anger. "Ma'am, with all due respect, what you said is _not_ correct. We _have_ had contact from his abductor, in the form of an envelope containing Hotch's credentials, wallet, and keys. True, there was no message in the package, but so what? It tells us he's still out there, and he's counting on us to bring him home."

Strauss frowned at him. "It does no such thing. Just because the UNSUB sent us Aaron's things doesn't mean he's still alive. In fact, it could be argued just as strongly that it indicates the opposite."

Morgan took a deep breath, struggling to maintain a civil tone. "Ma'am, Hotch is the leader of this team. He's one of our own—no, it's more than that. He's _family_ as far as I'm concerned. And if any one of us—including _you_, ma'am—were the victim, he'd never give up."

"Agent Morgan, I'm not unsympathetic," Strauss said, giving him a wan smile. "I want Agent Hotchner back as much as you do. He's a good man, and he's gone through a lot the past couple of years."

Rossi spoke up. "That's right, Erin. And that's why we need more than ever to stay on the job."

Strauss turned to him and shook her head. "I'm sorry, David. The Bureau can't be seen as putting one of its own above the public. If we just had some definitive proof that Aaron was still alive, perhaps I could justify the additional work, but as things stand, both protocol and budgetary concerns dictate—"

The throbbing in Morgan's temples sped up, threatened to explode. "Ma'am, you've got to give us more time!" He leaned over Strauss's desk, gripping its edge so hard his knuckles ached. "It's not as though we've got nothing. The lab finally managed to extract some DNA from the UNSUB's shirt we found in that Dumpster."

"That was two days ago, Agent Morgan. You know as well as I that if they'd found a match to that DNA they'd have notified me—us—by now." She eyed him coolly. "Now please remove your hands from my desk and take a seat."

Morgan straightened up as though he'd been slapped and glared back at her. "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but if you refuse this request I'm afraid I'm going to have to offer my resignation from the Bureau. I will not let Hotch down."

Strauss's look was pure ice. "I fail to see how removing yet another agent from our active roster will help being Agent Hotchner home, Derek."

While a small part of Morgan was thinking, _Don't call me Derek, ma'am_, Rossi jumped to his feet.

"Hold on there, Morgan! There's no need to go that far." He turned to Strauss. "I've got an idea—a suggestion to make."

The Section Chief flashed him a look of annoyance, but said, "Well? What is it, David?"

Rossi gave them both one of his Sphinx looks. "First, let's all just sit back and take a deep breath."

Taking the hint, Morgan dropped back into his chair, but he felt anything but calm. "What, Rossi? You know something I don't?"

"Nothing like that, Morgan," Rossi assured him. "But here's the situation. I came back to the Bureau because I love the work, not because I need the money. I propose, Erin, that you temporarily assign me full-time to Hotch's case, and the rest of the team can go ahead and work new cases. I'll keep everyone informed of my progress, and if I find anything actionable I'll call you both, any time, day or night. When this is over and we have Hotch back, I'll rejoin the team."

Morgan shook his head, said, "Come on, Rossi, you can't handle it on your own, one man can't—"

"I'm inclined to agree with Agent Morgan on that, David," Strauss said sourly. "And we'll still be down a man."

"Look, if the situation calls for it, I can always sit in on a case, or confer with the team online. And I won't be alone. On the team's off-time we can always discuss any ideas or leads I find. As for boots on the ground, we've got hundreds of police, Staties, highway patrolmen, hell, probably even park rangers combing the whole East Coast for Aaron."

Morgan watched Strauss as she sat for several moments weighing the senior profiler's arguments.

With a sudden grin, Rossi added, "And what's more, Erin, I have an advantage that Agent Morgan doesn't. Resignation won't hamper _my_ career in the least. So if you rule against me, I'll be the one to go."

Morgan kept his face utterly expressionless. "What Rossi means, ma'am, is that if you rule against _us_, we'll _both_ be going."

Strauss let out a long sigh. "Well, the unit obviously can't function two more men down. Very well, David. I agree to your proposal, for the moment. But you are to take no direct action against any potential UNSUB without my express prior approval. Is that clear?"

The glance Rossi shot Morgan was the non-verbal equivalent of a high five. "Yes, ma'am, it is. And now with your permission, I'd—we'd—like to get back to work."

**~ o ~**

Knowing about the phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome—understanding how it works, why and how it develops—confers no automatic protection from falling under its spell.

In the relative sanity of his solitude, Aaron Hotchner thought that he'd discovered one of the keys to his own lapse into Stockholm: the moment when his identification with Warden as a man whose wife, like Aaron's, had walked out on him outweighed the fact that the man had abducted him. Had drugged and tortured him. Had kept him prisoner for—what was today? Saturday, May 29th?

His fifteenth day here. More than two weeks.

He had to avoid falling into that false trap of sympathy again.

He also needed to rethink his survival strategy, to start thinking long-term, to stop counting on the Team to get him out of here quickly.

Strauss would never allow them to stay on one case for more than two weeks. There were too many other problems, all across the country. They always hated to let go, to surrender the case back to the locals, but—once they'd made their contribution, there was nothing else the BAU could do. He'd taken them off more than one case himself, when it was clear that other agencies were better positioned to carry the ball.

But he had to let them know he was alive, especially now that he was on the trail of his captor's identity. He was now completely confident that Warden had played no part in any of the prosecutions Aaron himself had led, which meant that whatever had caught Warden's eye had been listed under his fifth case, _Daniels, Fortney, et al_.

And he knew and could reproduce exactly what he had written in that column:

_Dan/Fort Summer '94  
>Hon Y Pawlicki<br>lead Cyn Allgood  
>Stan Fellowes<br>Nolin Daniels  
>Wallace Fortney<br>Mumbles  
>H Federman<br>guy fr Barbados  
>? Hewlett<br>Melva Rae K ?_

So … either Warden was one of something like seventeen defendants in a nasty corruption trial that had started with arson and ended with murder-for-hire, or he had recognized the names of the judge or the two other attorneys he had listed.

Judge Yvonne Pawlicki had also presided over his first trial.

Cynthia Allgood had also served on prosecution teams with him in his second and fourth trials, and Stan Fellowes had done the same in his first and ninth trials (but most of the cast of characters in the ninth, _Kwon, Park, et al_, had been Korean, so that was a probable non-starter).

So … Daniels, Fortney, in June of '94; or Jurek, Wilhousky, in December, '92; or Wassermann, Sinclair, March, '93; or Kelly, Sterman, November, '93.

Progress on other fronts, too: He was pretty sure he'd identified Warden among the kids in early photographs on the wall. Not often and never centered, the chubby and bespectacled boy appeared several times in groups, tending to position himself behind other children. The one time his face was completely visible, he seemed timid and unsure of himself. Many of the photos that included him had as their focus a confident, pretty girl who embraced attention. Even Diana backed off and ceded the spotlight to the little starlet.

Aaron now suspected that the pretty girl and Warden were fraternal twins, the two babies held by the pudgy woman in the rocking chair by a Christmas fireplace hung with stockings. They'd all grown up together, Warden and his sister and his bride-to-be. The profiler within him suggested a scenario in which the child he called Starlet was the preferred child and Warden the disappointment, who was later rescued by the effervescent Diana.

Working from there, he was now spending more time studying the adults he'd tentatively identified as Warden's parents and extended family.

The whine sounded, followed by the rattle.

A part of him, the legal warrior part, wanted to straighten his tie, smooth his hair, get his Kickass face on. His Aaron-fucking-Hotchner face.

Wrong face.

The clunk sounded, the door at the far end of the long room.

Footsteps sounded, sneakers this time. He wondered whether hard-soled shoes were for weekdays and sneakers were for weekends. Or whether sneakers were for off-hours. Could he find another way to check the passage of time by Warden's footwear?

"Are you awake?"

He bit back sarcasm. Today's battle was one that he absolutely, positively had to win. "I'm awake," he called back.

Warden slipped the latch and shot the window open.

Aaron stayed seated on the cot, hands in his lap. He got through the whole _You Warden, Me Prisoner_ thing without incident.

"And your statements?"

_Showtime._

Slowly, deliberately, with all the meaning and sincerity at his command, maintaining direct eye contact with the older man who peered at him through the window, he said, "Warden, I wish to acknowledge my part in your wrongful incarceration. I betrayed my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States. I participated in a conspiracy to convict an innocent man. I'm ashamed of and sorry for my malfeasance. I beg permission to do what I can to make restitution for the wrongs I have done to you.

"I understand that the length and severity of my sentence are contingent upon my penitence and good behavior. I thank you for your continuing effort to make my time served as humane and dignified as is consistent with my offenses against you and the justice system."

Warden peered across the cell at him with puzzlement, no doubt wondering what had caused the change in his attitude. Suspicious, and with good reason.

Aaron crossed to the wall, turned, and thrust his hands out around the bar, volunteering them for his captor to cuff. As he did so, he put on the game face needed here, the Penitent's Face—head bowed, eyes lowered. "Please, Warden," he said quietly, "I have a request. It's worth both my questions if you'll just let me speak."

The older man fastened the handcuffs around his wrists slowly, emotionlessly, and then said, "You may speak briefly."

Hotchner drew a deep breath and prepared to crawl. "Warden, first, I want to thank you for the resources you left on your last visit—the box of tissues, the shaving mug and brush, and especially the book of poetry—you're obviously doing all you can to make my time served as tolerable as possible. I appreciate your kindness. I know I've disappointed you, and I want to do better. I'm committed to doing better. But I must respectfully request mail privileges."

"Oh, preposterous!" Warden backed off from the window, his voice rising with his agitation. "Did you not understand me, Prisoner, when I explained it to you? It's a simple trade-off. While you don't enjoy mail and telephone privileges, at the same time, you aren't living in constant terror of the violence and sexual abuse that absolutely _pervade_ the so-called official justice system."

"Yes sir," he said, and hastily altered it to, "Yes, Warden. But I've thought about your words since we last spoke and—I'd like to propose a compromise."

"Oh, you would, would you?"

He longed to look upward, to gauge more accurately his opponent's emotional state, but it just wasn't worth the risk. "Yes, Warden. I would."

When the man said nothing, he dared to continue. "It's principally my son," he said. "Jack has already lost his mother. I don't want him thinking that I'm dead, too. That I'm never coming back." He leaned his head against the wall that separated them, speaking softly, urgently, passionately, as though to a lover. "Warden, listen to me: I haven't begged for anything yet, but I'm begging now. If I weren't cuffed in a standing position, I'd get down on my knees. I'm serious, I'll do anything—_anything_—for the opportunity to send just one letter. Just one. Write it yourself, write anything you want, but let me sign it and put my fingerprints on it. Please let me assure my friends and family that I'm alive."

"Your fingerprints," Warden repeated. "What use would your fingerprints be to your son?"

Aaron sighed. There was nowhere to go with that one but absolute honesty. "There's no way Jessica won't turn the letter over the the Bureau. Even if I wrote in big red letters, _Don't turn this over to the Team_, she'd do it. They'll verify it was my fingerprints on the letter, and Jack will know that I'm alive, that I'm thinking of him. Certainly, the Bureau will know I'm alive, too, but—is that a critical problem for you? Is it supposed to be a secret?"

Warden walked away from the window, and for a moment, he thought the man would enter his cell, but instead he returned to Hotchner. "This is a cheap offer," he said dismissively. "You have the benefit of knowing that I'm trying to be honorable here, to do the right thing. You're probably sure that I won't decide to abuse you physically...in any way. This isn't maximum security."

He was right—Aaron was fairly sure now that Warden got no thrill from inflicting pain, and despite the way the man had cut his clothes off him, he was close to positive that his little captor didn't profile as a rapist.

"That's true," he conceded, "but it wasn't a factor in my offer. I also offered to do anything. Say anything." He drew a deep, miserable breath. "Confess to anything."

And he would. It would mean nothing—tendered, as it was, under duress—but it would hurt nevertheless.

**~ o ~**

Thursday's adventurous Sagittarius full moon still rode high in the sky that Saturday night, sending one glowing, silvery ray through the window of the room above the Hawthornes' stable, the one Norton Charpentier rented and stayed in whenever he was in the area.

Norton turned away from the light and back onto his right side for what must have been the fourth or fifth time in the past hour. Once again, he tried to rearrange his pillow into a more comfortable shape, but sleep was proving elusive. This afternoon's visit to Prisoner had been so frustrating: Two full weeks now the man had been in that underground bunker, fifteen days with virtually nothing to do but try to figure out who the hell had put him there, and it was obvious his captive still had no clue.

Sure, he was crawling now. Sure, he was pleading, promising the sun, the moon, the stars, for mail privileges. _Mail privileges!_ Putting on his act, reading his statements so sincerely, just dripping false penitence, strutting his stuff the way he no doubt did in the courtroom, all but batting his eyes at Norton, and—as always—his focus was all about himself, rather than his crimes. An air of obnoxious self-righteousness still clung to the lawyer despite everything.

One side of him, the outraged side, wanted to storm back down there and scream _How dare you not recognize Norton Waldo Charpentier, the man whose life you deliberately and totally destroyed?_ The other side, the cooler, more analytical side—fortunately, his dominant one—argued _No, Prisoner has to discover his guilt for himself, otherwise he'll always be, in his own mind, an innocent man, the aggrieved party._

But how to get him to do that? He'd considered giving Prisoner trial transcripts and case files along with the books on wrongful conviction he'd delivered earlier, but had decided against it for that very reason. For even though there'd been numerous co-defendants in his case, Norton had been the only one the young Aaron Hotchner had both intensively interviewed _and_ examined in court. So giving him transcripts now—well, he might as well wear one of those red-and-white stickers that read _HELLO! My Name Is Nortie Charpentier._

No, recognition—and ultimately, penitence—had to come from within Prisoner. Any other approach was simply unacceptable and would result in, at best, a hollow victory. Norton sighed, knowing it was his responsibility as Warden to lead him toward those goals.

Well, he was up for the challenge, but in order to do psychological battle with a man as skilled as his captive, he needed his rest. Fortunately, there were always the stars to help and guide him. Slowly, deliberately, combining yoga and meditation techniques with his knowledge of the heavens, he let his consciousness drift out to them, to bask in their warmth and power, to fill him with their wisdom. At last his breathing settled into a gentle, regular pattern, and gradually, in a process as delicate as the most fragile flower, he became one with them.

_Looking down from the heavens, he saw himself riding Burley through the woods in the moonlight, heading towards the bunker. Then abruptly he was _there_, feeling the jolt of hooves, the tang of the cool night air, the dampness of overhanging leaves as they passed by. Ah, there was nothing as beautiful as the forest at night, ghostly images all around, the twitters and sighs of life hidden in the shadows._

_He reached forward to pat Burley on the side of his neck and was stunned to find...nothing! Looking down, he realized with a shock that he and Burley were now one, a centaur with his head, chest, and arms, and the horse's body and legs. Long hair streamed down his back, forming a mane of sorts. He—they—were Sagittarius incarnate. Instead of being horrified by this, he was delighted. Set free._

_Moving slowly forward through the darkness, he spotted glowing objects in the distance: a lion, standing regally, eyes glowing fiercely; a golden crab, scuttling up a tree trunk; a shaggy ram, his horned head tossing impatiently; an immense bull, pawing at the earth. _

_The Personifications, he thought. Who'd have imagined that they were so literal? He laughed aloud with delight. As he passed, each shimmered briefly, then turned into a common forest creature before slipping away into the night. But something up ahead still glowed; in fact, glowed more brightly the closer he came. At last he was able to make it out—no creature this time, but a fiery scale, two empty metal plates suspended by chains at either end of a long arm. Libra, he realized, the scales of Justice, and he was drawn to it as a moth to a flame. At last he stood before it, awed by its power, staring helplessly into the flames that surrounded it. But instead of consuming him, it caressed him, warmed him, soothed him. A joy enveloped him that he had never known before: he had been truly blessed._

He awakened to find himself man, not centaur. Still Nortie Charpentier, or at least the man who had once been Nortie. He sat up, scrubbed at his face.

The Scales of Justice.

_Gahh, Justice, which inevitably led back to Prisoner and his pathetic whining pleas_.

_I'll do anything_, the lawyer had said. Which he supposed also meant he would permit anything. Submit to anything.

Too bad he wasn't Waldo. Waldo Charpentier would have removed his suit coat, loosened his tie, never taking his eyes off his disobedient son. His disappointment of a son. His miserable fat slug of a son who was already trembling in terror. Would have taken the extension cord out of the drawer, doubled it, knotted it, and snarled, S_trip!_

_But he's dead. And I'm not Waldo_.


	15. Forms of Negotiation

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. Yes, this chapter's late; visiting my daughter and she's been keeping me busy!

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And they make us feel all warm and giggly, like maybe updating a little sooner!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Fifteen**

**Forms of Negotiation**

As he rattled down that lousy elevator, he was probably as unhappy as he had ever been since he left prison. It was a bad idea, it was a stupid idea, it was an idea spawned in hell, but he had to give it just one shot. Prisoner was so quick with facile assurance—_oh, anything, anything_—so blind to his essential dishonesty. So confident that if he just lowered his eyes and acted the part of a penitent he could get whatever he wanted.

He had to give Prisoner a chance to prove himself willing to learn rather than utterly faithless. He wanted to believe that no man was beyond hope, but—sometimes it was hard.

He strode to the window and opened it.

Prisoner was half-sitting up in bed, apparently awakened by the sound of the elevator. His hair poked up in all directions and his eyes struggled to focus. Even as Norton looked at him, he ran a hand through his hair, checked his jaw for stubble, and swung his feet (in their two pairs of sweat socks) to the floor. Checked his nails. Glanced around at his housekeeping, which was as blameless as usual.

_He may be faithless, but he learns fast._

"Warden," he croaked, and cleared his throat. "I'm sorry—I didn't expect you back so soon."

He knew that something was up. Norton could read it in his nervous energy, in the expression of concern, of anticipation—maybe apprehension—on his pallid features.

"Shut up, take off your sweater, and get over here," Norton commanded.

The lawyer wasted no time with questions, but removed the garment and hung it over the back of the chair he was using as a bedside table, then stood up and approached the window.

"Hands."

Prisoner thrust his arms out on each side of the bar, and Norton cuffed them securely. The lawyer's face was stony, stoic, but his breathing was ragged. A febrile fear, a "_My God, what did I do?"_ panic shone in his eyes.

Norton moved over to the door.

One lock. Two locks. Three.

The man in the raspberry cotton uniform stood with his forehead resting against the wall. Norton could tell from faint ripples in his forearms that he was clenching and unclenching his hands.

Norton took the extension cord from his pocket. "This may interest you," he said.

The prisoner glanced back over his shoulder and watched in silence as Norton folded the cord in half, then tied a knot in the doubled end of it. Was there fear in the set of those shoulders?

"The good news," Norton said, "Is that I have reconsidered your proposal for a compromise."

Now _that_ clearly engaged the prisoner's attention.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I think so," the lawyer answered. He continued to look back, not at Norton, but at the cord.

Norton let the cord dangle from his right hand. "So you know what this is for."

A breath. "I think so."

"So—what do you have to say to me now?"

The lawyer stood straighter, shoulders squared. "OK," he said quietly.

_That's it? Just "OK"?_

He visibly braced himself for the first blow. When it landed, he made a faint sound. It was the same with the second: He neither cried out nor protested. He just stood there.

Charpentier felt oddly embarrassed that he was hurting the lawyer so little. The man should have screamed by now, he reasoned—screamed the way he would have screamed, should have crashed to his knees sobbing for mercy.

He tried to hit harder, lashing out at the lawyer's back and buttocks a third and fourth time, but some kind of _I-am-not-Waldo_ sense made a mockery of his efforts. He considered and regretfully discarded the notion of making him strip, which might increase the pain but would increase the effort and sheer bother that Norton had to exert even more.

Damn it, he was supposed to have caved in, said, _Stop, stop_.

Because _he_, Norton, wanted to stop.

"Permission to speak, Warden?"

Norton looked up, startled. The lawyer leaned against the wall, panting slightly.

"Granted," he said without enthusiasm. He should have disciplined the man for his audacity, but he was distracted by the contrast between his fantasy and reality.

_Damn, but it was frustrating that there was so little satisfaction to be derived from justice. _

"You didn't deserve it," the lawyer said, his breath still labored. "It wasn't your fault that you weren't the kind of son he'd imagined you'd be."

Norton tightened his grip on the knotted cord. "What in the hell do you think you're talking about, Prisoner?"

"Was it because you weren't as interested in sports as he wanted you to be? Or because you weren't much of a salesman, much of a people pleaser?"

Charpentier froze, staring numbly at the man leaning against the metal cell wall.

"You're speaking out of turn, Prisoner." He reached automatically for the Enforcer.

"Yes, sir." His captive turned slightly, but he didn't stop talking. "He didn't appreciate your intelligence, your quick grasp of any subject matter you came across. Like the kids at school, he saw your intelligence as freaky and unnatural, something to be embarrassed about. He had a certain picture of what his son would be like, and he lashed out at you whenever you disappointed his expectations."

"My father was a good man," Norton countered, even as a part of him wondered why in hell he was defending the old bully. "He was sober and hard-working and faithful—"

"—and he preferred your sister," Prisoner said, his tone growing steadier by the second. "Even good men can be misled. He may have been a good man—and if you say he was, I believe you—but he made a couple of huge mistakes with you, and it wasn't fair."

Charpentier couldn't puzzle out what was going on. He had taken the knots dozens of times, maybe scores, and each time the individual stabs of agony had burned for hours, leaving him weeping in the privacy of his room. And yet here was this skinny wimp of an attorney, talking about Norton's father as if he had known him, serenely conceding that he was talking out of turn and that, logically, realistically, he was earning a chat with the Enforcer.

"So you _do_ know who I am," he said, his grip tightening on the cord.

"No, sir," the lawyer confessed with a sigh, "but I'm getting there."

"How long do I have to keep this up?"

Prisoner's response was grim, and he didn't bother to try turning around to look at Norton. "As long as it takes to win mail privileges," he said.

Charpentier quietly gathered up the cord, wound it tight, and stuck it in his pants pocket.

"One letter," he said, wondering how he could hold all the power and still lose.

**~ o ~**

To the best of his knowledge, it was Wednesday, June 2nd, his nineteenth day in captivity. He was wrapped, toga-like, in a sheet, and wearing his sweater. Aaron Hotchner was every damn bit as organized and analytical as his tormentor, and God certainly knew he had all the time in the world to plan strategies.

The little square door slid open.

Remembering Warden's grudging promise of a letter, he started to rise to his feet, checking his makeshift toga to ensure that it would stay up.

"Sit," Warden said.

Hotchner sat back down quietly on the cot, waiting for Warden to specify which way he was to face when he was shackled.

Instead, Warden peered in. He looked at Aaron, at Aaron's scrubs still dripping on the line, and back again at Aaron.

"Put your hands together on your head," he commanded.

_That's a new one._

Obediently, Aaron laced his fingers together in his hair. An ugly rectangular container more slime green than lime green, and of a slippery, soft plastic, hit the floor and bounced once.

"Stay," Warden ordered.

_Sit. Stay. Like I have a bunch of places to go…. _

_Maybe on the outside, he's a dog trainer._

"Inside the box, you will find a sheet of paper with printing on it, a stamped envelope, and a red ink pad. You are to sign the letter, mark it with the thumb and forefinger of your right hand, _over_ the text, address the envelope to the person of your choosing, and put everything back in the box."

Aaron waited, unsure whether to reach for the box or to wait for an explicit command.

"You will use your own home address as the return address," Warden continued. "You may collect the letter now."

_Oh, you mean "fetch"?_

A small part of him wanted to bark, but the rest of him wanted very much to communicate with the outside world, so he held his tongue. He got up, bent to pick up the small box, and returned to his cot without comment.

The printed sheet was folded in thirds, the better to fit into the business envelope that was included beside it. Aaron opened it and read the text and his heart sank. The words Warden had written were accurate enough as far as they went, but they certainly viewed the whole business from his own point of view, which was to say that Aaron richly deserved his incarceration and Warden was being good to him.

_But it's a start. Suck it up and let this one pass, and maybe if there's a next time, he'll give me a little more leeway._

He wondered whether he would have to submit to a beating every time he sent a letter out. Not that he viewed that as a barrier; he was far tougher than he looked. He was pretty sure that the one he'd experienced had taken more out of Warden than it had out of him. Warden had a fantasy that he was the Good Guy, fairly and impartially dealing out retribution. Confronting his Inner Monster must have been a bit of a trauma for him.

Of course, even a beating was contact, and contact always yielded information, the better to fine-tune the profile and to help Aaron work out an escape plan. He strongly suspected that Warden didn't care to repeat that performance.

"Write some generic closing," Warden instructed, "and sign your name. Put everything back in the case without sealing the envelope."

Hotchner thought about that. "Permission to speak, Warden?"

"Only insofar as it it relates directly to your task at hand."

"My closing would relate to the recipient," Aaron said carefully. "Who will get this letter?"

"To whom would you prefer to send it?"

_To whom_.

But that was a good question. "May I think about that for a moment?"

"Of course."

Hotchner focused all his analytical skills on that problem. Not Jack, not Jessica, although Jack was the person he most wanted to reach. They would rip it open, devour the contents, and in the process they wuld destroy any trace evidence that Warden left. OK, so…Rossi? Morgan? A small but vocal part of him wanted the recipient to be someone who cared, someone who thought with the heart first.

"OK," he said finally, and scrawled, _All my best, Aaron Hotchner_, on the bottom of the letter. "Do you want me to address the envelope?"

"Yes. And as I said, your own address as the return."

As he wrote the street number and name on the envelope, he wondered what the recipient would think, seeing Hotch's handwriting, Hotch's return address.

When he was done, he picked up the letter again. "May I add a small postscript for my son?"

There was a silence, then, "You may, but I will examine it, and if I decide that it contains anything inappropriate I will destroy the letter in its entirety and I will never let you know whether I sent it or not."

"I understand," Aaron said in his meekest voice. Carefully, in the block print that his son had just been mastering when they were parted, he wrote, "I love you and I miss you, Jack. I think of you all day and all night. You are my sunshine."

He had to stop there, because tears were beginning to stream down his cheeks and landing on the letter in fat wet plops. He wiped his eyes with his hand, then the edge of the sheet, mutttering an apology to Warden as he did so. Then he said "Thumb and forefinger?"

"Right hand," Warden confirmed.

Aaron opened the small red-ink stamp pad and pressed the required fingertips to its surface, then again on the paper, crossing the text so the BAU would know he had read what was printed there.

He stuffed everything back into the little plastic box and collapsed in on himself, sobbing helplessly. Warden appeared to understand what he was going through, because he waited until Hotchner again had control over himself before he directed him to drop the box through the window.

Aaron stood up and wobbled over to the window. Warden was several feet away from the window, his hands in the pockets of his khakis, frowning and watching his prisoner. Aaron let the box fall directly down below the window.

"Return to your bed and put your hands on your head," Warden instructed. When Aaron did so, his captor collected the box. He flashed a strange, grim smile at Hotchner through the window. "You see," he said, "I can be humane when you demonstrate the proper attitude."

_You're a complete monster_, Aaron thought, _and someday I will rip your heart out_, but he bowed his head and murmured, "Thank you, Warden."

_**~ o ~**_

On Monday night, June 7th, she headed straight home, too tired to think, let alone to stop for a drink or a coffee with friends. When she got home she found nothing but _Marie Cla__i__re_ and her Visa bill in her mailbox.

No, wait: a legal-sized envelope, hand-addressed to Ms. Penelope Garcia in a familiar angular, southpaw scrawl. Standard Liberty Bell "Forever" stamp.

She sat down, hard, hyperventilating. The envelope sat in her lap, plain white against pink paisley linen.

After a few seconds her unsteady fingers rummaged in her bag for her phone.

"Morgan," she said, feeling way beyond any temptation to flirt. "Did you get anything—interesting in your mail today?"

"What, Baby Girl? You mean at the office?"

"No. At home."

"Don't know. I haven't been there. Why, gorgeous? What's up?"

"Derek, I have a letter here addressed to me in Hotch's handwriting, with Hotch's return address. I—I don't know if I should even be touching it, maybe there's evidence on it."

"Garcia, are you sure?"

"Um, I don't know. As sure as I can be. This is his handwriting or it's a really, really good forgery. I've been deciphering his handwriting for eight years."

"Where's it sent from?"

"Zip code, hang on, it's all smeared—ZIP 10007, that's midtown Manhattan."

There was a long silence, then Morgan said, "Open it."

"What? What about evidence?"

"Open it," Morgan repeated. "That's the first and most critical thing."

She slipped a feathery pen into the edge of the flap and pulled. She wondered whether the envelope self-sealed, or whether somebody's—Hotchner's?—saliva was under the flap.

"Single piece of plain multipurpose paper," she said. "Folded in threes." She gasped. "Oh, my God, Derek! Blood! No, wait—I think it's stamp pad ink—red stamp pad ink, two fingerprints, nice and clear in red ink. Printed—laser-printer, I think. Aaron's signature. Derek, this is Aaron's signature, I'm sure of it.

"OK, it's just one paragraph, it says, 'I am writing to you so you can pass the word to those concerned that I am alive and in good condition. I am serving a term in a private prison for crimes and injustices that I committed. I am being treated humanely. The length and severity of my punishment are contingent on my penitence and good behavior. Please let my family, my friends, and my colleagues know they are always in my thoughts. Assure them that I will eventually be released. All my best, Aaron Hotchner.' And there's a printed PS to Jack, you want to hear that, too?"

"Of course, Baby Girl."

She read the block print to him, her voice close to breaking.

"It doesn't sound like him at all, Derek, except for the PS and the closing. Those words are handwritten, and that was a standard closing when he wrote letters."

"It's possible the closing and PS are the only part he composed," Morgan told her. "'… contingent on my penitence and good behavior'? That doesn't sound anything like Hotch."

"It doesn't. It sounds … creepy."

"OK, I'm coming over and I'm bringing a couple techs," Morgan said. "No, scratch that. I'm bringing the whole freaking team."

"And wait, wait, there's a little printed card here, instructions on how to reply to him! Morgan, there's a way to get a message to him!"

"I'm coming right over," Morgan repeated, and closed the connection.

Garcia sat very still, afraid to touch the paper and destroy evidence, but aching to make some connection with their missing unit chief. She fanned her fingers just above the print, not quite touching it, and willed herself to sense Aaron Hotchner's presence.


	16. Revelations

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Your comments are like dark chocolate and the smell of lilacs on a soft spring evening! And kittens! And bunnies! And puppies! And big fat juicy brown garden worms that SQUISH when you…oh, never mind. Anyhow, they make us feel all warm and giggly, like maybe updating a little sooner!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Sixteen**

**Revelations**

_A letter. A real, honest-to-God letter from Aaron Hotchner!_

They gathered there excitedly, all of them: Morgan, grim and composed, three weeks into being Acting Team Leader and still not comfortable in the role; Reid uncharacteristically sweaty from the gym; JJ wilted from her long day at the office, with _I-miss-Henry_ in her tired blue eyes; Rossi in jeans, sleepy but hard-eyed, smelling suspiciously of scotch; Prentiss unexpectedly damp and silent in a sarong from where she'd been relaxing poolside with a friend.

Then there were the techies from trace, Vaughn and Linda, solemn and suspicious, their big black leather cases of investigative instruments by their sides, gloves at the ready in their hands. They kept glancing around Garcia's cluttered, colorful living room as though it were a seething mass of potential crime scene contamination—which it was, sort of.

Finally, there was Kevin dancing around awkwardly at the periphery, FBI but not BAU, part of them but not truly one of them, belonging and not-belonging. When he finally settled down, perching on an antique buffet near the front door, he folded his arms across his chest and stared glumly at Penelope and the team.

Garcia surrendered the original letter, the envelope, and the small white card that had been included with it to the techies and passed photocopies of the letter around to the rest of the team.

Jennifer Jareau read the words silently several times, then shook her head and said, "'Crimes and injustices that I committed'? Hotch's on the very short list of people that I just can't imagine committing a crime or an injustice. He's Mr. Straight-Up."

"Nobody's perfect," Kevin said.

"Hotch is pretty close to it," JJ replied, with some heat in her voice.

"Nah, he's got his flaws, just like all of us," Rossi said. "He's no Saint Aaron. He's made his share of mistakes, and back when I first knew him, well—he could be a bit of a dickhead. No, really," he said as a murmur of protest arose. "His dad was a Class-A jerk, and Aaron had more than a little of that 'it ain't wrong if I didn't get caught' about him back in the day. But it was little stuff."

"At least we can stop wondering whether he's alive," Emily breathed, wonder still foremost in her voice. She studied the text for a few seconds and squinted. "Oh, God," she said. "This blurred little blob here, on the second line? Is that a tear?"

"Likely," Vaughn, the junior techie, said. He was at Garcia's kitchen table, bent over the original document with a magnifier while Linda, his superior, bustled around the table adjusting the poles that supported their light sources. "We'll know better when we get samples."

"Interesting verb choices," Spencer Reid said, penciling little marks on his copy. "'I am writing. I am being held…' Hotch doesn't use progressives when he writes. He's all bureaucratic masculine preterits and present tenses. 'I wrote. I am a prisoner.' That's what Hotch would say, and that's the way he'd say it. The printed part of this, the UNSUB or UNSUBs composed it. That would also explain the editorializing justifications about crimes he committed and how humanely he's being treated and the references to his penitence."

"That's Hotch," JJ said, blinking back tears. "I'd know that handwriting anywhere. Even the printing. And, oh, God, the 'You are my sunshine' thing…Haley used to sing that to Jack when he was a baby. Used to just rip Hotch apart when Jack asked him to sing it after she…after Haley, you know. I'm sorry, I just can't be analytical right now." She blindly reached for a tissue. "Sorry," she repeated, sniffling.

"Preliminary report?" Linda said, entering the living area. "Conclusively the prints of Aaron Hotchner, not only the ones in red ink, but several more prints on the front and the back of the page. A cursory examination suggests that the handwriting is also his, but I'd prefer to hold my conclusion until a forensic graphologist has seen it. Terry, I think, or maybe Susan would be good with this."

"Thank you," Morgan told her, and his voice was so businesslike, so much like Hotch's, that Garcia choked back a gasp. He turned his attention then to the message that sat on his lap. "There's no indication of numbers here, or even a simple singular-or-plural." He glanced at Reid. "That tends to indicate a single UNSUB," he continued, "which fits with what we have of Truck Man back in May, one man operating alone." He looked at the entire team. "If this is a single man successfully holding and hiding somebody as smart and resourceful as Hotch, he's damned intelligent and he's crazy organized."

"At least we have a motive now," Rossi added. "Personal grievance. He thinks Aaron screwed him over and he's all about exacting punishment."

"We know more than that," Garcia said, pleased at last to have something to add to the group analysis. "He sent that card, it's on the second page, with instructions for replying. We write up our answer to his letter and we post it to this Web site, it's…it's used by people like, oh, prison reformers, Amnesty International folks, people like that, to get messages to political prisoners. It gets a zillion hits every day from all over the world, mostly from organizations and universities. The downside is that it's gonna be almost impossible to pick out the URL where the UNSUB reads it from all the others, especially if he's already, like, at a university or active in one of those organizations."

"One of my possibles is on the faculty of a university—well, a little liberal arts college," Rossi said.

"'Possibles'?" Prentiss echoed, perking up.

"Yeah, a national run on facial recognition software—and it took two weeks to complete it—came up with thirteen white guys whose features are pretty much identical to Furface's."

"It'd be nice if the stupid program ran as fast as it does on crime shows," Garcia said sourly. "And if it always gave you just one person, one perfect person. But real life, people, is a bitch. How many of the thirteen have you and Stewie managed to eliminate, my friend?"

"Stewie?" JJ said.

"He's new in Human Trafficking and he's crazy-good, plus his love life is a shambles," Garcia replied, "so he doesn't have a problem hanging around the Bureau, doing extra stuff. He was perfect for someone to help Rossi on this."

Morgan stared. "Why hadn't I heard about this?"

"Nothing to report yet," Dave answered calmly. "We only just started pulling together this stuff and comparing it to the profile. Some of 'em are obviously wrong—way too young, too old, too fat, too skinny—one of 'em is in a wheelchair. Six bear a strong enough resemblance to our UNSUB that they warrant a closer look. Nobody's an exact match. It's possible—though unlikely—that our guy doesn't have a current driver's license or a state ID. I promise I'll have a detailed report in a day or so. Reid, I'll want to sit down with you and your famous maps for a while. Can I meet with you tomorrow for a couple hours?"

"Sure," Spencer said with an eager nod.

Rossi looked at his fellow agents. "But this thing, this gives me a lot more to work with now, to add to the profile. Personal grievance, private prison—I don't like the sound of that at all—computer savvy—"

"Not that much," Garcia interrupted. "It doesn't take much techie skill at all to bookmark that Web site, to upload a message—you just register and click a button. Takes even less to read the messages that are already there. Anybody can scroll through them; no registration necessary. We're talking thousands of new posts a day in more languages than I can identify."

Reid studied her. "Have you spent time on this site?"

"No, silly genius. I checked it out while you-all were on your way over here. I figured that was the least I could do." She reached for another sheaf of papers. "Here's what I have on the owners and administrators of the domain. It's administered out of Switzerland, but the owners are two Brits and a Belgian, big-time, _huge _names in the human rights movement."

"So it's completely on the up-and-up," Morgan said with a sigh.

"Oh, totally," Garcia assured him. "And as long as we're the ones who register and upload, and all he does is scan the postings for a message with his ID number, a snowball in hell has nothing on the slim chance we have of identifying him from that."

"On the bright side," JJ added, "he's the one who's buying stamps and handling letters and mailing them. He can't _always_ avoid leaving trace. He'll make mistakes."

"I'm concerned about the implications of the text," said Reid.

Garcia looked down again at the words she had already grown to hate as much as she loved the hope that receiving them had given her.

_I am writing to you so you can pass the word to those concerned that I am alive and in good condition. I am serving a term in a private prison for crimes and injustices that I committed. I am being treated humanely. The length and severity of my punishment are contingent on my penitence and good behavior. Please let my family, my friends, and my colleagues know they are always in my thoughts. Assure them that I will eventually be released._

"'Private prison,'" Reid read. "'Serving a term.' There's a grandiosity here. This UNSUB, it's not that he thinks he's _above_ the law; in his mind, he _is_ the law."

"There's some indication of humanizing, though," JJ pointed out. "Just acknowledging that Hotch has family, friends, colleagues who care about him—that's a step up from objectifying. I mean, I know it isn't much, but I'll take my reassurances where I can find them."

"But the 'eventually released' thing is pure bullshit," Morgan added. "He goes to the trouble to abduct Hotch and put him in a private jail, there's no way that at some magical end of his so-called sentence, he's gonna just unlock the door like a real prison and say, 'Go, you're free; here's a suit and ten bucks and a bus ticket. Keep your nose clean.'" His features darkened. "Hotch has seen him and he knows where he is. There's no way this guy's ever gonna let him walk out of there alive."

**~ o ~**

On Tuesday evening, June 8th, the man who had once been known as Norton Charpentier eyed himself critically in the mirror of a hotel room in Boston and adjusted the knot in his tie.

_Not bad_, he decided, adjusting the lay of his suit jacket on his shoulders. The hardest part of his transformation from grotesquely fat ex-con into the person he was now had been getting accustomed to looking at his reflection. He had spent the first thirty-nine years of his life avoiding mirrors, retreating into the background of photographs, hiding behind other, more attractive people.

There was a gentle tap at his door. He knew it was Joanne, recognized her tentative tap, but he peered through the security eye and confirmed her identity before he opened the door.

"Yoo hoo, it's me," she caroled. She had changed into one of those little black dresses she seemed to have by the dozens. Her arms, remarkably slender and toned for her age, were raised in the act of fastening the clasp of her necklace at the back of her neck. A champagne blonde by choice, she valued expressiveness in her face and had only recently reluctantly submitted to what she called _a wee bit o' the Botox_.

He smiled. "Come on in. What's up, Miz Jo?"

"Could you do up my hook?" She turned and presented her back to him.

"Oh, I think I probably could," he said, not moving.

"God, you're such a picky-ass!" she said with a giggle. "_Will_ you, then? _Will_ you do the little hook thing at the top? And would it kill you to close the door?"

He reached past her and shut the door, then turned and wrestled the little hook at the top of her zipper into its resting place. "There you go," he told her. "All properly fastened up."

"Do you think I'll need my wrap?" She indicated the folded emerald green satin in her free hand. "I don't want to take it unless I'll need it."

"The weather thing on Google said it would drop to sixty before midnight," he replied. "Other than that, it's up to you."

Sighing her annoyance, she tucked the wrap under her arm, beside her jeweled clutch purse. "Ready?" she said with a grin.

He offered her his arm and a matching grin. "Always," he said.

Two minutes later they emerged from the elevator into the ornate lobby, where two other couples immediately approached them, greeting Joanne effusively.

"Wonderful to see you, too," she said, "and this is Joe, you've heard me talking about Joe, I'm sure."

The males thrust hands toward him for shaking. The females looked him over stem to stern, then looked at Joanne, working out the calculus of the relationship for themselves with hard analytical eyes.

He wondered idly what Prisoner would think of him if he could see him here—wondered what it would do for him and his sacred _profiles_—seeing him with her, on his way to an early dinner and a glittering benefit performance of _Khovanshchina_.

**~ o ~**

On what was probably the night of June 9th, a Wednesday and the twenty-sixth day of his captivity, he was reviewing his finished current assignment—a ten-thousand-word essay on prosecutorial misconduct, complicated by the fact that Aaron had no damn idea where his captor wanted him to go on the subject—when he heard the usual sounds that heralded Warden's arrival. He glanced around his cell, brushed the front of his scrubs, and ran an exploratory hand over his jawline.

_So far, so good._

"Are you awake?" Warden called.

He set aside both his notes and the completed essay. "I am," he called back, vigorously massaging his left hand, his fingers, his wrist. Writer's cramp seemed to be an ongoing condition of his life lately.

The door behind the red rod slid open, but instead of the usual _Me, Warden, you Prisoner_, crap, his captor said, "Get your laundry line."

Somewhat confused by the command, Hotchner rose from his cot and collected the loops of nylon cord from the shelf above the sink.

_Could have been worse; I could have had laundry hanging on it._

"Place your chair correctly."

That was a new one, but he figured out quickly that Warden meant to fit the chair legs into the holes in the floor. This oriented him with his cot and the toilet to his left, the door and the window with the rod to his right, and the sink and the larger of the two photo collages directly in front of him.

"Sit down."

He'd seen _that_ one coming a mile away.

"Using one end of the laundry line, tie your left ankle to the left side of the chair. Make sure that it is high enough that your foot cannot touch the floor."

Mmm. That didn't bode well.

_Question it, or ride it out and see what happens? Hurry up, Slick, make your decision. Time is running out …_

He did as he'd been told. When Warden told him to fasten his right ankle to the other side of the chair, he complied slowly and deliberately, trying to buy a little time to anticipate what his captor had in mind.

He could think of a dozen things, and none of them was pleasant.

"Permission to speak, Warden?"

"No."

_Yeah, definitely not in pleasant territory here._

Warden's arm reached through the opening, dangling the handcuffs. "Here," he said. "Take these and put them on."

Feeling a chill of dread, he took the cuffs and asked, "In front, or behind?"

"Front is fine." Warden's voice didn't have that heavy feel to it that he got when he was about to climb all over him for some real or imagined failing. It just sounded…ordinary.

He closed the bracelets around his wrists, let them fall to his lap, and sat still.

Three locks opened.

_This is new. _

He sensed Warden behind him, then a heavy strip of foam and canvas encircled his upper body, securing it to the back of the chair with a crackle of Velcro.

His face showed nothing, but internally he cringed, wondering what new indignity his captor intended to inflict on him. He could feel perspiration breaking out along his sides and across his brow; he fought to keep from doubling his hands into fists.

Something warm was draped like a bib across his chest and over his shoulders—a baby's receiving blanket, he realized with profound shock—soft and ticklish, in pastel tones. Teddy bears, he noted. Green teddy bears, yellow stars, blue striped puppies and pink plaid kittens.

"Keep your head up and hold still," Warden directed.

"Permission to—"

"No. Just hold still. Don't be such a baby."

Something touched the right side of his head and he tensed in anticipation…then relaxed as he recognized the feel of a comb. Warden was combing his hair.

_OK, that's…beyond weird._

A snip.

_Good God. A haircut? A fucking haircut?_

"When I was in prison," Warden said, his voice conversational, "they trained me as a barber. So strange, I thought at the time. I have a Master's, after all. I suppose I just presumed that they would put me to work in the library, or somewhere I could use my education. (Keep your head up, please.) But, no. The first voc-rehab slot available was in barbering, and so a barber I would become. Who could have imagined that it would be useful seventeen years later? Just goes to show you, I guess."

And after days of almost nothing, the verbal and nonverbal cues Hotchner needed to flesh out his profile began tumbling from the sky like so many snowflakes as Warden snipped away.

Master's degree. Proud of his education. Odd phraseology: _and_ _so a barber I would become_.

And he said please. _Keep your head up, please_. Surely just habit, not meant as a signal that the dynamics of their relationship had altered in any way. A sense of humor, or at least irony. Prison sentence either began or ended about seventeen years ago.

That would be 1993. Aaron had been with the DoJ back then; he didn't move to the Bureau until '98. _OK, definitely one of the first three cases._

An infant's blanket, old and worn.

Don't attach too much significance to that, he reminded himself; it might just be that it's the right size.

That's true, he argued back with himself, but there are also photos on the walls of Warden's wife and their infant daughter. Don't outright presume _no_ significance.

"Look down, please," Warden said at last, gently nudging the back of his head.

Again with the _please_.

A cordless razor hummed and cleared stray hairs from the back of Hotchner's neck.

"I think that'll do," Warden said. He whisked the blanket off Aaron's shoulders with a flourish. "You'll want to clean up the floor around this, of course."

His captor walked around the chair. "Give me your hands," he said.

No please to it _this_ time.

Hotchner raised his cuffed hands as far as the Velcro band would permit.

Warden looped a piece of bright blue nylon rope around his hands, tying them in a large, loose double knot on the top, where Hotch could easily see it. Then he unlocked the cuffs and tucked them into the back pocket of his slacks.

_Oh. That's what's going on._

He really had to hand it to Warden in some ways; the little creep had clearly spent a lot of time thinking through his strategies.

The Velcro was released and the band disappeared.

"Don't forget to clean up," Warden said. "I'll be back to check your assignment and deliver your fresh supplies in an hour or so."

Locks clicked and he was gone.

Aaron raised his bound hands and sank his teeth into the double knot.

_Just when I started to think I had him figured out…_

_**~ o ~**_

He was pretty sure that it was the morning of Thursday, June 10th—his 27th day in this metal box—when things came together for him.

It was his second case, _Wassermann, Sinclair, et al._—Warden had been the fat, sweaty dude who would have been a small fish in the prosecution of a huge child prostitution and kiddie porn ring if it hadn't been for his attitude, his sense of superiority and entitlement. He had a sister, too, married to one of the principals, either Wassermann or Sinclair. He thought it was probably Whatsisname Sinclair. Jerry. No, _Gerald_ Sinclair, the toad whose auto parts racket served as the front for the operation.

Warden was the brother-in-law, the accountant for Sinclair's auto parts business. Guy's name was…Carpenter? No, Charpentier, right. He recalled how the self-righteous little blob freaked out when Aaron pronounced it "Charpenteer"; no, it was "Shar-pen-tee-ay." Or "Shar-pent-yay." Something like that. He really got his panties in a wad when Aaron said it wrong, so, of course, he'd gone out of his way to get it wrong every time because it kept the defendant off-balance, more likely to screw up and get his story wrong. Plus, it was fun to watch him freak out, Hotch recalled.

Norman. No, Norbert. Norville? Should have been _Narwhal_, given the size of him.

_Christ, this is because I mispronounced his fucking _name_?_


	17. Meltdown

A/N 1: Cowritten with my bashful but brilliant beta, Esperanta, she who keeps my prose typo-free and boasts an imagination more twisted than my own. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Trying to strike meaningful balance between team screen time and main story. Always grateful for reader input! Sorry for lateness; I (Kitty) have been down with a doozy of a cold or flu or something-or-other the last few days.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Seventeen**

**Meltdown**

Aaron was sitting cross-legged on the cot, eating an orange, when suddenly the reality of his cooperation with—his _submission to_—a self-righteous little puke of a child molester began to eat away at his soul. With all his strength, he flung the orange across the room. It spattered most satisfactorily against the wall, sliding down to the floor as a mass of juice and pulp and seeds.

He thought about cleaning it up, but why? Warden—no, _Norton_. Once he'd finally recovered that elusive first name, Hotch had burned it into his memory by thinking _Norton Hears a Who_—Norton had been there just the day before, playing barber and criticizing some of Aaron's citations in his essay. He was unlikely to show up again any time soon.

Aaron leaned over and pulled the food box from beneath his cot. He collected the remaining two oranges, both apples, and (after some consideration) both tomatoes from the shoebox where Warden—where _Norton, Nortie the Child Molester_—always packed his fresh fruit and vegetables. Setting them in his lap, he shoved the sleeves of his sweater up his arms and took aim.

The oranges caromed off the wall unharmed, but the apples must have been a tad riper. They burst against the metal and slid to the floor dripping seeds and pectin. The tomatoes burst like fat red water balloons, like organic fireworks, and some of their blowback even reached the foot of his cot, but even their destruction couldn't reduce his rage.

He stood up, recovered the oranges, and pitched them repeatedly until they, too, splattered the wall and dripped juice and pulp down between the Plexiglas and the wall, soaking into the photographs of Warden's—of Nortie's—family.

Panting, shaking in his fury, he threw the chair against the wall once, twice, three times. On the fourth contact with the metal wall, it shattered into three sections of varnished wood and exposed pegs.

He recovered the pieces and backed up against the opposite wall. Holding each piece high over his head, he threw it with all his strength, so hard the effort made his muscles ache, at the far wall. He was panting and weeping and cursing incoherently by then, and he was no longer positive what most enraged him: Norton's cruelty and hubris; his father's voice inside him, still snarling _Loser! Whining little loser! Rules are for entry-level people, for the masses! What's wrong with you? Why can't you pay attention? What's the matter with you?_—hitting his son with whatever happened to be close at hand; or himself, for thinking that he could protect himself, win back the right to his life, by sucking up to Porky the Child Molester and his miserable fucking rules.

The ceramic shaving mug was next to go, littering the floor with tiny shards, and when there was nothing left, he threw himself against the wall, battering it with his fists and his feet and his forehead until he managed either to exhaust himself or to knock himself out, he would never be sure which.

He regained a sense of himself some time later, crumpled against the wall amid the splinters and shards and the fruit pulp. Bruises already throbbed on his head and hands. Blood dried and pulled at the skin on his forehead and mouth. Tiny pieces of shaving mug had drilled into his feet, his shins, his knees.

He looked around himself through eyes beginning to swell shut. _He's going to kill me when he sees this mess_, he thought, then drew a deep, shivery breath.

_So fucking what? I'm not making it out of here alive anyway. Better sooner than later._

**~ o ~**

They gathered on Friday afternoon, June 11, 2010—four weeks almost to the minute since Aaron Hotchner's disappearance—around the table in the conference room. David Rossi was in charge of the presentation, and he was involved in last-minute instruction by Garcia in the proper use of the remote.

Morgan wondered what the problem was, since it operated exactly like a television remote.

Ah, well—it's _Rossi_.

"OK," the senior profiler said finally, climbing to his feet. "Furface, aka Truck Guy, is five feet, eight inches, and probably weighs around one-sixty, one-seventy. We've estimated his age as 35 to 45, but he could be as young as 30 or as old as 50, so we included everything from 20 to 65. We included possibles listed from five-six to five-ten, allowing for Furface lying about his height or wearing lifts.

"So far, we haven't been able to find any connections between Aaron or any of his cases and these thirteen guys. There's a limit on our searches because we don't have warrants for some areas of inquiry at the moment, but as soon as we've narrowed the field to the point that we can establish probable cause, we'll turn Garcia loose on that along with Durbin," he said, referring to the other lawyer in the BAU. "Larry's not quite as creative as Aaron was—_is_—at probable cause, but he's getting better.

"We've profiled our UNSUB as a loner, either single or divorced, intelligent, possibly well educated, but more likely self-taught, and working at a menial job. We've tried to verify where each of these guys was from 4 to 5 PM, EDT, on May 14th. We've narrowed it to maybe four now, but I'm gonna show you all thirteen, in case any of you sees something that triggers something."

He pressed a key on the remote and a vaguely familiar face appeared on the screen. "This is Number One. He's 26, lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He's too young and too muscular, a serious bodybuilder. Owns a sedan, not a truck. He's only on the list now because he mostly fits the profile, he's just a four-hour drive from here, and we can't verify where he was in the critical time-frame."

"I think I've seen him somewhere," Emily said tentatively.

Rossi gave a short laugh. "They're all gonna look familiar, 'cause they all look kind of like our Furface."

"What does he do for a living?" Morgan asked.

Rossi didn't even have to consult any notes. "Works the drive-through at McDonald's and has quite a recreational drug habit."

He clicked the remote and everyone inhaled sharply. "Yeah, this is Number Two. He's 44, lives in Bradenton, Florida, a pretty remarkable match to the face, which is the only reason why he's still on the list. He doesn't fit the profile, he lives in Florida, and he's been in a wheelchair all his life—but we don't know where he was in the critical time-frame, either, so—still on the list.

"Get used to everyone looking more or less like our UNSUB," he counseled.

"Here's Number Three—I feel like a game show host. Number Three is 38, lives in Marietta, Georgia, upper limits of height, and we've verified where he was in the critical time-frame. He's still on the list because he's a violent stalker with two convictions for domestic violence and he drives a truck, although it's a Chevy. Plus, I just don't like him.

"Number Four—" he clicked the remote "—is 44, a resident of Torrance, California, with, as you can see, a very strong resemblance to Furface and the right size, too. We can't verify where he was in the critical time-frame, although if he left California, he got back there pretty fast. He isn't much of a match to the profile, but you can't escape the facial resemblance."

"What does Four do?"

Rossi nodded at Morgan. "Social worker, recently laid off. By all accounts a nice guy, wife and kids, stable marriage. Moving right along….

"Number Five is 61, and lives in Aspen, Colorado. He's too old and he's verified as being on the job during the critical time-frame. He's only on the list because, A, he's gay and Strauss insisted that we keep that possibility on the profile, and, B, he's a plastic surgeon, so there's some potential there for altering people's appearance." He rolled his eyes and clicked the remote.

"Number Six falls down in the resemblance department, but he has other winning qualities. He's 31 and lives in Tupelo, Mississippi, far young end of our age estimates and he's thinner than our UNSUB, but in other ways he's really promising. Drives a Chevy truck, recently fired from the police department, rumored ties to corruption, organized crime, over his head in debt, and nobody's seen him or his truck for a month. Hasn't used his credit card but he called his dad on Memorial Day—his dad's a Vietnam vet—so he's still out there."

Rossi bent and picked up his coffee cup, took a couple sips, and clicked the remote again.

"Lucky Number Seven is 29, from Staten Island, New York, too young and a little plump, but with the Harrisburg connection and that Manhattan ZIP code on the letter, he looks a little more interesting. Significant criminal record, heavy drug user, and we can't verify where he was in the critical time-frame. On the minus side, he doesn't own a vehicle and has no driver's license."

"Job? Criminal history?" Morgan prompted.

"Construction worker, convictions for theft, assault with intent."

He beamed. "Moving along, Number Eight is 59, lives in State College, Pennsylvania. Too old for our age estimates, but as you can see, a striking resemblance to our UNSUB, plus he lives four hours from here. Strikes against him include that he's alibied for the critical time-frame, he doesn't fit the profile, and if this does relate to Aaron's career before the FBI, this guy's a naturalized US citizen; he was in Canada until 2002." He grinned. "And he was _here_ during the Mason Turner mess," he added, referring to a case they'd consulted on in Ontario. "All the wrong places at the wrong times."

"Is he from Ontario?" JJ asked. "Could he be a friend of the Turner family?"

Rossi shook his head. "If he is, we haven't come across the connection yet. This guy's from upper middle-of-nowhere British Columbia.

"Here's Number Nine. He's 40, he lives in Dearborn, Michigan, just a hop, skip, and a jump from Adrian, where the truck tags were stolen. Probably the least persuasive resemblance to our UNSUB. He can drive, but he doesn't have a car. He's a mental patient who announced in late April that he was going to visit his sister in Philadelphia—he doesn't have a sister, in Philly or anywhere else—and nobody's seen him since. And need I mention how close Philly is to Harrisburg, or how they're on the same Amtrak route that the newspaper disappeared on? If he looked more like Furface I'd be happier, but he's still in my top four.

"Number Ten is 49, lives in San Diego, seems a lot more muscular and bulky than Furface and he's been verified as being with his girlfriend during the critical time-frame, but in a lot of ways he fits the profile, and he drives a Dodge truck. He's reportedly loud, argumentative, heavily in debt, with a huge vindictive streak. Only problems are that he isn't much of a match for our guy, and that the only way he could have made his way here and then back is by plane and he doesn't show up on any airline."

"Private flight?" Reid suggested.

Rossi shook his head. "We checked, and anyhow we don't know how he'd have paid for it. He could have access to big wads of cash, of course, but we don't have any proof on that."

"What if he used an alias?" JJ put in.

Rossi shook his head. "Since 9/11, that's not as easy as it used to be. I'm not saying it's impossible, but pretty unlikely given TSA identification protocols."

He snapped the remote again. "Number Eleven is 52, lives in Jersey City. A tad too old and apparently he has a pot belly on him, but Jersey City is, what, fifteen minutes from Penn Station, in the heart of ZIP 10007? Other than that, he doesn't have much in common with the profile and we know where he was in the critical time-frame.

"On the other hand, Number Twelve is my personal favorite. He's a 43-year-old out-of-work salesman living in Sandusky, Ohio, who fits the profile pretty well even though this guy has apparently had that full beard for years. He was allegedly solo backpacking during the critical time-frame. Oh, and he has a Ford truck. And do I need to mention that if you're driving from Adrian, Michigan, to Cleveland, Ohio, even if you take the Turnpike, you're gonna pass within spitting distance of Sandusky? I'm flying out tomorrow to take a closer look at Mr. Twelve.

"And finally, there's Number Thirteen. Thirteen is 63, lives in Anniston, Alabama, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Marines, and there's no way he's our guy, since he's too old, verified as being in the hospital having minor surgery during the critical time-frame and he's nothing like the profile, but, holy crap, he could be our boy's twin brother—I mean, just look at him!—so I refuse to take him off the list."

**~ o ~**

"Are you awake?" Norton called as he approached the cell on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 15th, Prisoner's 32nd day of incarceration.

"Yeah," the lawyer replied, his voice barely audible.

Norton slid the door aside and peered in at his prisoner. Dark bruises marked his brow, and his scrubs were filthy, torn and stained. He hadn't shaved in days, nor had he bothered to brush his hair. The ladderback chair was nowhere in evidence—although it might be standing against the wall that contained the window and door.

Something, clearly, had happened to plunge the man into despair. Whatever it was, it'd come after he left the cell, after he'd cut his prisoner's hair, replaced his resources, and given him a hot meal of chicken and noodles, biscuits, and a spinach salad. Prisoner had seemed contented, quietly grateful for what his Warden liked to think of as "real food."

"What's your name?" he asked.

The lawyer regarded him dully. "Prisoner," he whispered.

"And mine?"

His captive gave him a long, searching look. Something undefinable crossed his features and then vanished. "Warden," he said listlessly.

Norton studied him for a long moment, trying to decipher what was going on, trying to figure out if Prisoner was up to something—shamming—or in genuine distress. If he was acting, he was doing a better job of it than he'd managed anytime prior. No, this seemed genuine enough. He decided to forego making Prisoner recite his statements today, and instead spend the time checking on his physical and mental state.

For as much as he hated what Prisoner had done to him, and to his family, he did not feel entitled to take the man's life, except, of course, in self-defense if necessary. Justice demanded that Prisoner pay the same price as he himself had, and if he went beyond that, then he was no better than the man who had wronged him.

"Come here," he told Prisoner, his voice almost gentle. "Hands."

For a moment something flashed in Prisoner's eyes and Norton almost thought he was going to refuse. That possibility had occurred to Norton, and he'd planned for it. But thankfully, after a moment or two of hesitation, Prisoner unfolded himself stiffly and came over to the little sliding door, extending his arms through it.

Norton stared at them in surprise. Ugly bruises nearly covered his knuckles and the backs of his hands, and his arms even had splotches of dried blood from numerous small cuts.

He wondered whether his prisoner's intent was to portray depression so accurately, play upon his sympathies so skillfully, that he, Warden, would enter the cell without securing him to the wall. If so, he'd unleashed a world of hurt on himself in vain.

"You're a mess," he said softly. He handed his prisoner the manacles. "Carefully," he cautioned. "No sense in making the damage any worse."

The lawyer studied him as if wondering what the catch might be, but he closed the cuffs over his wrists, his expression still bleak.

Norton Charpentier cleared his throat. "Your only assignment for today," he said, "is to explain to me exactly what's going on here—at least whichever parts of it you understand."

The man in the cell seemed barely to hear him. "It's all so pointless," he muttered.

Norton nodded. "'It' being—what, exactly?"

"This whole thing, me being here. Why don't you just kill me and be done with it?"

"Because that would be unjust," Norton answered. "Your punishment is to be the same as mine."

Sudden anger blazed in Prisoner's eyes. "You call this justice? Since when do ex-cons get to demand equal time from the people who put them away?"

Norton stiffened. "'Ex-con.' Let's talk about that, shall we?" He reached for the handcuff key and unlocked the cuffs. "Tell you what, let's make this a face-to-face discussion. Turn the other way and let's try this again."

Momentary surprise crossed the lawyer's features, but he obeyed in sullen silence.

The locks clicked open in sequence, and Norton entered the cell, sat down on Prisoner's bed. He looked around the cell in amazement. The space was clean, but nearly every moveable object in it had been destroyed. A heap of splintered wood was all that was left of the ladderback chair, and the wastebasket was overflowing with the battered remnants of Prisoner's rage.

It took considerable effort to force himself to look away from the mess and back at the lawyer.

"Why am I an 'ex-con," as you call me?" he asked.

The look on Prisoner's face was one of bitter contempt. "That's obvious—because you were convicted of a crime, served time, and, obviously were either released afterwards or escaped."

"Has it ever occurred to you that I was wrongfully convicted?"

"I'm well aware you _think_ you were. Ask any ex-con, they're all innocent, either they didn't do it or they were just misunderstood. Society has it in for them, they never catch a break, blah, blah, blah."

"Mmm." Norton kept his tone even, measured. "Let's deal with the last part of that first, shall we? The 'blah, blah, blah' part." He raised his head so he faced his captive squarely. "Because that is where you will find me, Prisoner. Among the 'blah, blah, blah.'"

Consternation and confusion warred on the lawyer's face. Norton struggled to keep his posture relaxed, his features blank. How many times he'd imagined this moment! A thousand times, no, more, he'd dreamed of the moment when the truth of him was laid out for this miserable piece of judicial flotsam to absorb—and all the positively biblical weeping and gnashing of the teeth that would ensue in the wake of that realization. Long before he'd solidified his plans to take the lawyer, he'd imagined this moment.

And it was nothing like the way he'd pictured it. _Nothing_.

He figuratively shook his head, bringing himself back to the here and now. "Among the 'blah, blah, blah,'" he repeated. "Among the 'D. None of the above.' Do you get my meaning?"

His prisoner shook his head slightly. "No," he answered, his own tone as measured as Norton's own. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"If I've neither been released nor escaped, what else could be going on here?"

Comprehension blazed in Prisoner's dark eyes. "No wonder I didn't recognize you," he rasped. "You aren't him at all, are you? You're his brother. His freaky brother with a grudge. He's still in the can, and you're determined to take it out of my hide."

It was Norton's turn to feel consternation and confusion. "Oh, dear," he sighed. "It seems that you're more creative than intelligent, Prisoner."

"Oh, right," his captive sighed. "This is all a dream, right? And you're, what, the fucking Ghost of Convictions Past?"

It was Norton's turn to sigh. "Typical disrespect for anyone who gets on the wrong side of the system. Well, sticks and stones, as they say." He got up, approached his captive. "Listen to what I'm telling you, Prisoner, and apply your justly famous analytical skills. As I said, I was among the "D. None of the above. So, if escape is (A), release upon serving my time is (B), and death is (C), then what does that make (D)?"

Prisoner's mouth set in a grim line, and he said nothing, but it was obvious that he was thinking furiously.

"Very well," Norton said. "I'm leaving now, but before I go I'm giving you more food and replacements for some of the things you destroyed. I'll replace the chair, but if and only if you promise never to intentionally damage or break it again. Do I have your word on that?"

The lawyer gave a grudging nod.

"Sorry? I didn't hear that?"

The lawyer whispered, "You have my word."

"All right. Clean yourself up and launder your uniform as best you can. I'll bring you another the next time I come." He opened the cell door, went out, and came back a few moments later with a loaded dolly, the contents of which he stacked on the rumpled cot.

As he removed Prisoner's cuffs, he added, his voice once more gentle, "And though it's not an assignment at this time, you might give some thought to the subject of forgiveness. I think you'll find it well worth your time."


	18. Playlist, Part One

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: **We're in the middle of this thing now!** Beginning's done (duh!) and the end is done, but here in the middle—we have all these little subplots to keep balanced, and we don't want any mistakes, no having to backtrack. No, "oh, crap, _when_ did we say this happened?" moments. So … a wee bit slower on updates, but the finished product should be worth it. We beg your patience.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Eighteen**

**Playlist, Part One**

He didn't know what time it was anymore, not for sure. That was the most troublesome part of his meltdown: While he wasn't shaving, when he lay huddled in his blankets for what felt like forever but was probably three to five days, he'd lost track of how much time elapsed.

He wasn't sure how he could possibly feel any worse—or more confused.

He'd finally figured out what Warden had been talking about. So his—Norton Charpentier's— conviction had been reversed, big freaking deal. Convictions got reversed all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Maybe he was granted a new trial and he skipped out while he was waiting for it. Nobody in his right mind—

_Nortie isn't in his right mind, man…._

But he'd replaced everything Hotchner had destroyed. _Everything_. Even the damn steam iron, that Aaron had found so amazingly useful once he got over the sheer weirdness of it. His scrubs dried faster when he ironed them, and if he ironed his sheets just before he crawled into bed it was wonderfully warm and toasty.

_If I don't watch it, I'm right back into Stockholm Syndrome. He's not being kind. He's being crazy. They aren't the same thing._

_Whine. Rattle. Clunk._

Aaron sat up in his tangle of bedclothes. He ran his fingers through his hair and massaged his still bruised and discolored face.

_No. It's barely one shave—twelve hours._

Frantically, he tried to recall what the last assignment had been, the one that preceded his weird thing about giving some thought to the idea of forgiveness. Something about _Berger v. United States_, he recalled that. Probably some essay on it, which should be a freaking walk in the park for any federal prosecutor, hell, for any lawyer, the case law was so damned iconic, but Hotchner couldn't recall which aspect of the decision Warden—Norton—had asked him to write about, or in what context.

He heard the hand truck, one of its wheels whining as it bounced over the uneven surface of the poured concrete floor outside his cell.

He took a moment to remind himself of the hundreds of survivors he had interviewed—all of the amazing men, women, and children, but mostly women and children, the most vulnerable populations—people who had endured far more pain, more isolation, more humiliation, for far longer than he'd suffered at Warden's hands, and with less mental and physical preparation than he had.

He owed it to _them_ to stop cracking under pressure like a whining chickenshit.

For Elizabeth. For Peter. For Rita and Sherie and Jacqui. For Oliver. For Martha.

_That's a worthy memory exercise: List all of those amazing survivors, for myself and for them._

"Are you awake?" the familiar voice called.

_Always the same question_. "Yes," he called back, suppressing a sigh, thinking that after he got out of there he might be tempted to throttle anyone who asked him that, just out of pure primal instinct.

"Good," Warden said, closer now, and as the little metal door slid open, he added, "I was worried about you."

Aaron said nothing, but thought, _I'll just bet you were._

"Come here and be cuffed. I want to see how you're doing."

Wordlessly Aaron got up off his cot and went to the window, presented his still-swollen hands. Once again, Warden closed the cuffs over his wrists more gently than usual, or at least it seemed he had; it was tough to tell considering parts of his skin still felt numb.

The locks whirred and clicked, and Warden—Charpentier—entered the cell. Immediately his nose wrinkled. "My God, it stinks in here!" He walked over to Aaron, sniffed, then shook his head. "It's not you—I can see you've cleaned up—it must be the bedding." He went to the bed, bent to smell the blanket, and jerked upright as though he'd been goosed. "Whew! You're in luck, Prisoner. I'll get you some fresh blankets and linens."

"Thank you, Warden," Aaron said, though frankly he didn't particularly care. He'd been so upset the past few days he hadn't even noticed the smell.

"You do look better though," Warden told him as he gathered up the bedding. "Still look like a three-day-old banana," he said with a slight chuckle, "but nothing that won't heal."

_What am I supposed to make of this friendliness? This damn near bedside manner?_ Aaron wondered what Warden thought, in his most private fantasies, about the ultimate outcome of the whole take-Hotchner-captive project. Were they to become friends, or co-conspirators? Best buddies? God help him, _lovers_?

There was a click on the other side of the wall and Warden's—Norton's—boombox kicked in.

Mm. For the first time, the music that emanated from the anteroom wasn't symphonic. It was—it was—_come on, think_!—it was "Come Together," from the Beatles _Abbey Road_ album.

_OK, horrible coincidence that I just wondered if he thinks we could be—lovers—and now he's playing _that_, or did I pick up some kind of subliminal signals from him? _

Hotchner bent a little and moved his head around, trying to catch some glance of his captor, hoping he wasn't prancing around like Buffalo Bill in _Silence of the Lambs_ because that was too creepy even for Warden, but you just never knew.

"_He got hair down to his knees_," Warden sang in a pleasant baritone, "_Got to be a joker, he just do what he please—come together, right now, over me._"

_Oh, Jesus, is that his idea of "Music to Seduce Prisoners By?"_

Norton appeared in the doorway bearing replacement bed linens. "_He wear no shoe shine_," he sang happily. "_He got toe jam football_—you like the Beatles, Prisoner?"

"They're all right," Hotchner replied in as neutral a tone as he could summon.

"_He say, 'I know you, you know me, one thing I can tell you is you gotta be free'_—And you will be, I promise," Warden continued in a speaking voice. "You seem sure that I'm going to kill you. I'm not."

Hotchner looked at Norton Charpentier cautiously. If the little guy started expecting a little something from him, would he put out? Hell, yes, as long as there was a strict and verifiable quid pro quo getting him out of here faster—except there was nothing verifiable about Warden's little DIY operation, so—Aaron found himself privately grinning—_You're shit outta luck, Nortie_.

"You really expect to just—unlock your little underground palace some day and let me loose?"

Charpentier reached up and set a little apple-cinnamon air freshener on the shelf above the sink.

"Aw, Jesus Christ, Nortie," Hotch was horrified to hear himself bellow, "don't you have _anything_ around here that doesn't smell like fucking _food_?"

The little man whirled around, an almost comic expression of stunned surprise on his face. "So you _do_ know who I am!" he gasped, and abruptly the look of surprise was replaced by a facial tic, something that'd never happened before in Hotchner's presence. It was an odd, blink-blink-and-near-wink jerking movement of the left eye and cheek, and Aaron couldn't tell if his captor was going to explode in fury or bust a gut laughing. He braced himself for the worst.

But after what seemed like an interminably awkward moment, Warden relaxed and broke into a sly grin. "All right. Took you long enough! The question is, though, do you understand what you did to get into this situation?"

Aaron said nothing, but his heart was beating so fast he wasn't sure he could've spoken if he'd wanted to.

"I didn't think so," his captor said finally. "As for your question, Prisoner, yes, I do intend to set you loose when you've served out your term. I'll leave you to work out how that will happen." He took a step closer to Hotchner. "And regarding the subject of food, Prisoner, I'm sorry, but I'm no Gordon Ramsay—and neither am I 'Nortie' to you. Remember your manners. It's _Warden_, or _sir_. Understood?"

_Damn, that was close!_ Amazingly, Aaron felt depressed and exhilarated at the same time. "Yes, sir," he said softly, somehow fighting back both a grin of his own and an almost irresistible urge to say, "Yes, Chef."

**~ o ~**

It was Wednesday morning, the 16th of June, in north central Ohio. Aaron Hotchner had been missing for 33 days.

David Rossi, in jeans and designer jacket, accepted a refill on his coffee, smiled at the server, and pretended to read his newspaper. Two tables over, the new assistant manager of Sandusky Superior Tire picked at his breakfast platter almost as if hoping to find something to complain about. The dude _loved_ to complain and he was good at it, voice perfectly pitched to _seem_ as though he was trying to be discreet, but easily audible several feet away. A master at the art of public embarrassment.

Rossi knew this; he'd been following the little creep since Saturday afternoon.

Nowadays, Rossi was as likely to find himself humming or whistling Johnny Rivers's "Secret Agent Man" as any of his Rat Pack favorites. He'd—well, _they'd_, meaning the BAU—decided to keep his little investigation low-key, in part because of the pathetic lack of probable cause for any of his thirteen potential candidates for Furface. Essentially, that meant that when it came to his candidates, he was working undercover.

_There's a man who leads a life of danger;  
>To everyone he meets, he stays a stranger… <em>

The other critical aspect, the more important part, was the whole "private prison" thing. If the UNSUB was truly working alone, It was as critical to locate where Hotch was being held as it was to identify his captor. If Aaron was being held in the basement, the attic, the closet of an UNSUB's residence, that was one thing. If he was squirreled away, say, in a storage shed on the UNSUB's great aunt's farm, that was a little bit trickier. Ideally, before anyone even vaguely official stepped into the UNSUB's line of sight, they—meaning David Rossi—would already have worked out where Aaron was held, and in a perfect world, would already have set him free.

Number Twelve, the unemployed salesman who was Rossi's favorite, had indeed shaved off his beard, which had probably helped him bag the job at Sandusky Superior Tire. It'd also inched him further up the list of likelies. As to where he was keeping Hotch—if he _was_ keeping him somewhere—it was in one of three or four locations, each less likely than the last.

His phone buzzed. He took it out, read the faceplate, and murmured, "I have a special filter on this phone, Garcia. Only good news. Anything else just turns to _la-la-la-I-don't-hear-you._"

"Then you're in luck," the tech analyst purred. "Or out of it, depending on what you're looking for. Any way you look at it, it narrows your field. Your Michigan guy just showed up."

Ah, yes. Number Nine, the mental patient from the suburbs of Detroit. Rossi visualized the map in his head. He was a two, three hour drive, tops, from Dearborn, if Penelope had called with good news.

"I'm waiting," he told her.

"A body they cut down in the woods in Sterling State Park has been positively identified as your guy," Garcia said. "Coroner ruled it a suicide, TOD at late April, probably not long after he told his social worker he was going to visit that sister in Philly that he didn't have."

"Huh. Well, like you say, it narrows the field a little."

"That it does, _mon brave_," Garcia replied. "How's that whole undercover thing working out for you?"

Rossi watched Number Twelve scowl at his bill and check it against both the menu and his pocket calculator. "Just fine," he said to Garcia. "Using muscles I thought I'd lost—forgotten I even had them."

Number Twelve, apparently finding no error worth bitching about, collected his things and rose from his booth.

"Gotta go," Rossi said. "On the move. _Arriverderci_, Garcia _mia,_" He broke the connection, and replaced his phone in his shirt pocket. Johnny Rivers's voice rang in his head.

_Be careful what you say,  
>You'll give yourself away!<br>Odds are you won't live to see tomorrow.  
>Secret … Agent Man, Secret (thump thump) Agent Man…. <em>

**~ o ~**

That same Wednesday morning, in east-central Pennsylvania, Ted Hawthorne poked his head into his den and jingled his car keys. "Headed for the dump in ten minutes," he told his wife. "Anything to contribute?"

Bren smiled back at him. "I'll look around."

When he was gone, she pulled the recyclable liner from the basket, but as she started to tie the ends together, she caught sight of four crumpled pieces of pastel paper.

_When on earth did I…?_

She pulled them out of the bag. Unfolded them, studied them.

_Right. That "mystery" stuff the printer chewed up when Sarge was copying it a couple weeks back._

She spread one sheet flat and shook her head at the chicken-scratches, right up there with the worst handwriting she had ever seen.

Then two names in the second of five columns leaped out at her, suddenly decoded: _Anthony Chestnut, Marcus Purdom_. Then at the top of that column, _Worley/Purdom, Oct '96._

She knew those names. Knew all three of them, in fact, and knew exactly what they were doing in October of 1996. Her academic specialty had been American history, and her specific subspecialty was organized labor in the twentieth century, the troubled power struggles between unions and management. These were the names of people who'd been involved in a huge corruption and racketeering case, one that Bren Hawthorne had often used—had even passed out salient chunks of the trial transcript—in her college classrooms to illustrate the way political action funds had changed the way labor unions did business, and not always for the better.

The voices of the Bobby Fuller Four rang in her mind:

_Breakin' rocks in the hot sun,  
>I fought the law and the law won,<br>I fought the law and the law won…. _

_Hon Hi Stover_ would be the cowboy-booted, six-gun-toting Hiram Stover, who presided over the case. Anthony Chestnut had been the government's chief witness, an FBI agent who had infiltrated the union's power structure and its ties to the very politicians it claimed it wanted to replace.

_I needed money 'cause I had none,  
>I fought the law and the law won… .<em>

She stood up and began rummaging through her old class notes, opening file drawers, folders of loose paper.

"Stuff to feed the dump?" Ted prompted.

_Where has the time gone?_

"Ah, sorry, nothing just now," she said distractedly and blew him a farewell kiss.

_Got it._

She shuffled through the contents of a fat folder and compared it with the notes scrawled in the handwriting from hell on the crumpled sheets.

Whoever had written this had even known the names of the three assistant prosecutors: Coe, Lehman, and Brodzinsky. She wondered why the anonymous writer had left off both the lead prosecutor and one of the top defendants. Ever the academic, she picked up a ballpoint that advertised her local State Farm agent, clicked the top, and printed into the appropriate slots _Aaron Hotchner_ and _Karl Jay Newman_.

With a smile, she remembered Sarge's words when he was making copies of whatever this list was.

_A puzzle, huh? A mystery?_

_I _love_ puzzles._

An examination of the other three crumpled sheets that her elderly printer had chewed up when Sarge was making his copies yielded only one other page of the three, one that seemed also to list court proceedings, this one from October of '94 through April of '96.

_Hmm. Wonder whether these are pages two and three, or one and two?_

_I miss my baby and I feel so bad,  
>I guess my race is run,<br>'Cause she's the best girl I ever had,  
>I fought the law and the law won… .<em>

**~ o ~**

The sun was setting on a perfect Friday afternoon as Jennifer Jareau settled in at a picnic bench with Will and Henry, the dinner she had packed for her family, and an assortment of ice cream treats. It was June 18th, the five-week anniversary of Aaron Hotchner's abduction, and JJ'd managed to bag a little personal time, a long weekend, Friday through Monday, to visit her folks in Pennsylvania.

Will dug the plastic spoon into his maple walnut sundae and glanced around them through his shades at the kids, the parents, the various people enjoying the weather. "Which one is he?" he murmured to her.

JJ shifted Henry and offered him orange sherbet. "That guy," she replied, nodding toward a man, tieless, but in a suit, walking along the fringes of the crowd with another man, much taller and also white, and a black woman who in her medium heels was about the size of the potential UNSUB. All three would be members of the Hazelhurst College faculty.

Will checked him out. "Dresses better than Furface," he said, "not that that means anything."

It had been Will's idea to pair JJ's loneliness for her family and frustration at doing so little to track down Aaron and bring him home. A trip home, he reasoned, with a (cough) coincidental first-night stop in State College, home of Number Eight, would satisfy both longings. And if they happened to choose the park adjacent to the grounds of Hazelhurst College, where according to schedules posted online, this man was delegated to cruise this evening, just in case there was any trouble that involved a Hazelhurst student—well, what a pleasant coincidence!

The local oldies station had set up their RV nearby, and a table where they offered free cheap items with the station's logo, and a few simple games (to win marginally higher-end cheap items). Their current broadcast boomed Jefferson Starship from their top-of-the-line sound system.

_Say you don't know me or recognize my face;  
>Say you don't care who goes to that kind of place…. <em>

Most of the Hazelhurst students who were attending summer classes there flocked to the other end of the park, where the local alt-rock station's van was set up, of course, as did the majority of all the kids here, from the enormous campus of Penn State University (and the reason for the existence of State College), but those whose parents were visiting tended to park them at this end. Old Fogey music made their hearts warmer, their minds more tolerant, and their pocketbooks a little looser—all of which were important qualities to encourage in visiting parental units.

_Don't tell us you need us, we're the ship of fools,  
>Looking for America, coming through your schools… <em>

Alas, nothing the target of JJ's scrutiny did while they watched him contributed much to his profile. Furface was allegedly a loner; Number Eight demonstrably had friends and his people skills seemed solid. He laughed easily and appeared comfortable talking with his peers, with students, with parents, with passing children. He drank a beer. He threw darts competently enough to win a fanny pack with the logo of the oldies station on it, and allowed the woman he was with to drag him out into the area set aside for dancing long enough to establish that she could dance—and he couldn't.

_We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll!_

**~ o ~**

It was the late evening of that same Friday, June 18th, heading into Saturday, the waning energies of Moon in Virgo kissing the waning energies of Sun in Gemini. It had been a brutal day, a never-ending day, and all he had to show for it were a few good words from the head of his department and a cheap fanny pack.

He really hated the elevator. It made groaning and whining and farting noises and it always seemed just a whisper from breaking down entirely. Even knowing that there was an interior ladder he could climb back to the top—or down to the bottom, then take the stairs—if it broke again could not completely alleviate his tension.

This bunker had, after all, been constructed by wildass white supremacist bozos fueled by a vision from a madman—the private-sector version of _built by the lowest bidder_. Charpentier had at long last located a trove of the bozos' writings (appropriately enough, in transcripts of the civil proceeding against them in the late '80s and the federal _let's kick 'em when they're down_, post-Oklahoma City, anti-militia fueled action of the early '90s).

The feds apparently prefer stationary targets.

The guys who designed it may have been barely literate, but their hatred for everyone and everything different from them had at least inspired them to build one hell of a prison. The cells were eight-by-eight because that was the largest size steel plate they could fit in the damn elevator. Bolt the damn things together, and _voilà_-modular prison housing! He wondered where they'd managed to find steel plates like these. Maybe from a Navy or civilian ship scrapyard, there were several of those within driving distance: Philly, D,C., or one of the numerous boatyards on the Great Lakes. Or Pittsburgh, focal point of the iron and steel industries, and an easy drive away to the west.

But why use steel plates, when other materials would've been a lot cheaper and easier to handle? Turns out, Norton had learned recently from perusing the stash of old journals and diaries, that their idiot leader had been frightened as a child by tales of people accidentally sealed into the hulls of ships. The bunker was designed to emulate Idiot Leader's childhood nightmares. Not terribly mature, but ruthlessly effective just the same.

Eight-by-eight. Hell, even Norton himself had been given more room than that when he was serving his time, at least when he got free of the nightmare that was Marion, one of the two federal maximum security sites. Of course, he had always shared the cell with another man. Most of the time it had been Arluss Watson, big and paranoid and (like most of his cellmates; the fates loved to laugh) not particularly motivated toward personal cleanliness. Arluss had been OK, though…friendly enough, if suspicious of anyone who enjoyed reading. Arluss was known to move his lips when he _thought_, after all. But people left Arluss alone, and for the most part, that meant that they left Norton alone.

Sometimes he dreamed that he was back in prison, but Arluss was never his cellmate. It was always Damien what's-his-name, the psycho who had only shared his quarters for five days, but who had made a huge and negative impression on a terrified Norton. Or else it was Bartoletti, the weird, mumbling old street hood who cracked his knuckles, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and made grammatical errors so blatant that it drove Norton nearly crazy. And once, he had dreamed he shared his cell with Prisoner. That had been creepy as all hell.

The elevator touched bottom with its usual rattle and whine.

Norton Charpentier stepped out into the large anteroom.

_What the hell?_ For a moment he stood motionless, startled by the sound booming from the cell some twenty feet away. _I'll be damned. He's singing! Not a bad voice, either. _He recognized the number immediately from _The Pirates of Penzance,_ transposed up a key or two to better suit Prisoner's baritone:

_But I'll be true to the song I sing,  
>And live and die a Pirate King.<br>For I am a Pirate King!  
>And it is, it is a glorious thing<br>To be a Pirate King!_

Had Prisoner not heard the elevator because of his little concert, or did he know he was being visited again and wanted to make a show of defiance? Oh well, it was of no importance, and Prisoner had fallen silent anyway. Norton walked over to the cell area and slid open the little door. Hotchner—no, goddammit, Prisoner!—_Prisoner_ was sitting in the ladderback chair, his long legs stretched out before him and crossed at the ankles. Somehow, even in an old gray sweater and purple cotton uniform, he still managed to look dignified. Now, as the lawyer looked up at him, Norton had a sudden vision of his captive, much younger, standing on stage as an audience applauded.

Unable to resist, he asked Prisoner, "What role did you play?"

After a momentary start, the man answered, "Chorus, Warden. High school."

_Ah, but you fantasized about playing the Pirate King_, Norton thought, remembering the photo of that dark and intense boy who'd gazed out at him from the pages of the Burning Hills yearbook_. Why else would you remember his lyrics so well after all these years? Instead you became what you thought was the next best thing: a White Knight. It feeds your ego while justifying your abuses._

"Come here and cuff yourself."

Prisoner's gaze grew distant. Norton knew he hated cuffing himself, knowing as any good profiler would that participating in one's own imprisonment was a form of mental surrender. But as in everything, he had no choice if he wanted supplies or human companionship.

Once Prisoner's arms were thrust through the window, Norton handed him the cuffs and watched closely as the man put them on. At Norton's nod, he jerked his wrists taut, proving they were properly fastened.

He unlocked the cell and went inside. Prisoner glanced over his shoulder at him, but quickly looked away.

The cell was neat and Prisoner's personal hygiene was above reproach. Whatever demons had seized his spirit earlier in the week had evidently slunk away.

When they had completed their Warden/Prisoner questions and the lawyer had mumbled his way through his statements, Norton seated himself on the cot. "How many musicals were you in during your school days?" he asked.

"Only that one."

"In the chorus."

"Yes, Warden."

For one blinding instant, Norton Charpentier wished that Prisoner were his friend, that he could confide his lifelong love of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to him. Tell him of the first time his Aunt Sylvia took him to a performance of _The Mikado_. To tell him how he sang in the choruses of _Iolanthe_ and _HMS Pinafore_ in college, how he and two other accounting guys had won second prize in a campus talent contest singing the first act trio from _Mikado_, the one that started, "I am so proud..." with Norton singing the part of Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner.

_My brain it teems  
>With endless schemes<br>Both good and new  
>For Titipu, for Titipu….<em>

It would be so nice just to chat, to get to know a little bit of the man behind the often sullen and resentful Prisoner.

But being Warden was a fearful responsibility, and he would never take it lightly.

He looked at his captive, still facing grimly away from him. He withdrew a fold of papers and slipped it under Prisoner's pillow.

At last he said, "Very well. Now turn and face me."

Prisoner shifted position as best he could and met Norton's gaze over his shoulder. _He's a tough one...hard to read. But I think he's progressing as well as can be expected._

"I have something for you." When there was no visible reaction, he added, "Not supplies, though there are some of those too." He smiled. "I left it under your pillow."

Prisoner's eyes widened and he stared wordlessly at Norton for a full fifteen seconds. Then finally something in the man's face cracked and he whispered, "You're the _Tooth Fairy_?"

Caught completely unaware, Norton howled with laughter, clutching at the frame of the cot to maintain his balance.

_If circumstances had been different, we could have been friends._

"No," he finally managed. "And I'm not sure how much good fifty cents would do you in here, anyway." Prisoner's face lost its cheer, and remarkably, he didn't want to see it gone. "Better than that," he assured the lawyer. "Your friends have responded to your letter, and I printed it out for you."

If Hotchner's—_Prisoner's_—eyes had widened before, now they were huge, as in Andersen's Fairy Tales eyes-big-as-saucers huge. _You didn't expect that, did you?_

Part of Norton wanted to stay behind and watch Prisoner read the letter, but another, more genteel side, wanted to give the lawyer his privacy. He stood up and headed for the door.

"I'll be back in a bit," he announced. "We have some unfinished business from our last visit, don't we? _Berger v. United States_?"

Prisoner murmured "Yes, sir," almost absently. His gaze seemed drawn to the pillow, to the exclusion of anything else. His lifeline to his loved ones.

In the elevator on his way back to the surface, more of Ko-Ko's words reverberated in the former Norton Charpentier's mind:

_To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock  
>In a pestilential prison with a life-long lock…. <em>


	19. Communications

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: **First HUGE mistake**. Good writers, crappy mathematicians. We'll stand in the corner on this one: **35 days is 5 weeks, not 7**. Nobody to blame on this one but Kitty, who's vice president in charge of numbers. We've corrected what has gone before.

A/N 3: **We're in the middle of this thing now!** Beginning's done (duh!) and the end is done, but here in the middle—we have all these little subplots to keep balanced, and we don't want any [more] mistakes, no having to backtrack. No, "oh, crap, _when_ did we say this happened?" moments. So … a wee bit slower on updates, but the finished product should be worth it. We beg your patience.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Nineteen**

**Communications**

Aaron sat quietly in his cell, trying to calm down, for several minutes after Warden left.

His hands were trembling so severely he actually stopped, fisted them together in his lap and breathed, slowly, in and out, in and out, trying not to hyperventilate—_What if this is a joke, a trick? What if this is a dream?_—before he dared to reach under the pillow.

It was—_Oh, my God!_—it was three pages, _three_, and as he unfolded them he saw that they were text and pictures both, too good to be true. If his hands had been shaking before, they were out of control now, which was just as well, because he was suddenly awash in tears of—what? Relief? Joy? Eagerness?—swiping at his eyes and nose with the sleeve of his sweater, mewling. _Come on, Slick—get a grip!_ Reaching out sideways for fistfuls of toilet tissue, using them to scrub his face.

Yeah. Like he was anything like a steaming pile of _together_ about now.

He managed to get the pages straightened out on his legs and tried to focus on the words that were printed there. It seemed to be a printout from a Web page. A fraction of an inch of the bottom of each sheet had been trimmed away precisely by a paper cutter, probably with the URL, the date, and perhaps even a username listed there.

First words, like a posting, were identified in bold print as from **Section Chief Erin Strauss**. She wasn't on the top of the list of people he wanted to hear from, but he read her words as if they were honey, as if they were pure delicious oxygen to his soul.

_We're not sure what you are supposed to have done and we don't understand why you are being held but we are grateful you're allowed to communicate with us. Please let us know if there's anything we can do to lessen your sentence or improve your conditions. We're always thinking of you, Aaron. Never forget that!_

That was a textbook proper response to his situation, he realized, right out of the negotiator's playbook, encouragement and humanization, yet he sensed the woman's spirit in her words.

"Thank you, Erin," he whispered.

The next paragraph, short, barely a line, was headed **Derek Morgan**.

_Stay strong, Hotch_, it read. _We're grateful that you were given a way to communicate with us. You're always in our thoughts. We're working on this day and night. _

Hotchner touched the printed letters with his fingertips, knowing intellectually that this was a printout from a computer posting, and yet getting the sensation that he was touching Derek Morgan, sensing his strength, his determination. Morgan was a man of few words, but those he chose to use he infused with undeniable intensity.

_Stay strong_.

That would be a lot easier now that he knew he wasn't isolated; that he had contact, however brief and third-hand, with his loved ones.

He brushed away a tear and blinked the page back into focus.

The next paragraph was labeled **Dave Rossi**.

_You already know all the stay strong, we're behind you, stuff, so I'll tell you that the updated re-issue of _Malignant Predation_ has already earned me enough royalties that when you're out of there we can go to Arby's. Maybe even get the BIG jamocha shakes. Sky's the limit, friend. Also, Prentiss has got herself a cat, and he's a mean SOB. You gotta know what song I'm thinking every time I see one of the pix she's posted all over her area. Oh, yeah, and stay strong, Aaron. _

Hotchner could hear the senior profiler's voice as he read the words, could see the cynical, self-deprecating grin on his face. Could recall him bellowing Presidents of the United States of America as they drove along the dusty back roads of some godforsaken Utah county, _Fuck you,_ _Kitty, you're gonna spend the night—outside!_ after some mangy stray scratched deep gouges in Dave's forearm.

_God, when was that? 2008? And how does Rossi know all this obscure musical stuff? It can't all be from video games._

**Jen Jareau**, the next paragraph was headed. Jen. Not Jennifer, not JJ. **Jen**.

He wondered whether that was a hidden message of some sort.

_Morgan and Spence and Will and I are alternating nights at Jess and Jack's so they'll always feel safe and Jack will always have someone to talk to, no matter what the hour. Morgan's playing basketball with him, Will set up a little archery butte for him at the back of the garage, and Reid's teaching him to deal blackjack. Quite the education! We can't give him normal, but we'll give him the best approximation of it we can. Do I need to mention that you're in our thoughts constantly?_

His Team. His family. Unspeakably grateful for all of them, he shuffled the top sheet to the back and turned to page two.

**Garcia**, the top line said. Just **Garcia**.

_Thank you for entrusting your letter to me, Hotch. That means a lot to me. We're all thinking about you all the time. Don't lose heart. We've been instructed to show no backgrounds in image files, so excuse that crappy old thing we wrap around the Xmas tree. FWIW, person(s) holding our Aaron Hotchner, the fingers of my right hand are forming the letters, I, L, Y, the American Sign Language shorthand for I Love You. No super secret FBI code. You can look it up._

Following the words was an inserted photograph of Penelope, her hand raised exactly as she had described, a brave and not entirely convincing smile on her face. The monitors that were usually arrayed behind her were draped with the ratty green cloth they swathed the base of the BAU's little aluminum Christmas tree with every year, the one that looked like the hide of Oscar the Grouch.

"You were the natural choice," he told her image, drinking in the explosion of color and light that defined their technical analyst. "Heart and mind. The perfect choice."

He signed "I love you" back to the graphic.

And gasped at the image that followed Garcia's.

**SSA Emily Prentiss**, the paragraph was headed, but the picture preceded it. Emily was seated cross-legged in front of some kind of afghan with zigzag patterns of gray and rose, but he barely saw her, because in her lap was Jack Hotchner, in a soccer tee and shorts. He was holding a cranky-looking black cat.

_Hey, Hotch_, she had written beneath the photo, _finally found a couple men I can get along with for more than a couple days. You know one; the other's name is Sergio. Jack calls him Yu-Gi-Oh! Sergio isn't used to kids but Jack's so mellow and patient that Sergio seems to think he's just a short grownup. Jess and Reid and that bunch let loose of Jack long enough to let him escort me to the zoo and a parade. We didn't take Sergio. We miss you and we talk about you all the time._

He drank in every inch, every pixel of his son's face. So big! He seemed to have grown, to have matured so much in—Jesus, almost five weeks, right? But was that maturity he saw in Jack's face, or was it stress? Jack grinned at the camera and held the cat in a death grip that might explain the cranky expression on Sergio's furry face. He leaned familiarly against Emily Prentiss, a boy comfortable with his father's colleagues.

Aaron ached with pride, with love, with emptiness. He would cheerfully have given his arms, his legs, his sanity, for a chance to touch that little body again.

"Jack," he whimpered, his voice breaking, then turned—almost desperately—to the next paragraph on the page. No images included.

**Spencer Reid**, it began.

_I stayed up all night trying to think of the perfect way to embed a code into my message that you would understand perfectly and your captor(s) would miss, then I thought, but if I were caught it could endanger you. So I spent the next night awake trying to think of a message that could be proved conclusively to contain no hidden messages at all, but you know how tricky it is to prove a negative. So this is just me saying, stay strong, we're doing all that we can. Jack and I went to the circus. He didn't laugh at the clowns, but he thought that when the elephant pooped it was hilarious. Garcia says this proves what an evolved little guy he is. JJ says that it just proves he's a guy. I don't know; I thought it was pretty funny too._

Hotch chuckled in spite of himself, picturing the elephant. Picturing Reid, trying to figure out how to send, or not send, a hidden message. Picturing Warden losing sleep over Spencer's message, wondering whether there really was a message hidden in it.

But then, at the bottom of the second page, there was a photographic image of a piece of yellow lined legal paper, upon which, in red marker, Jack had printed in his familiar beginner's block letters:

**HI DADDY THANK YOU FOR THE LETTER. I KEEP IT BY MOMS CANDLE AND YOUR PICCURE AND I SING TO YOU EVERY NIGHT.**

_Oh, God. Oh, Jack…._

He was such a keening, drooling mass of tears and snot that he set the letter on the floor so he could get his emotions out without soiling that precious piece of paper with another drop of his bodily fluids.

But he knew for an absolute certainty that he was awake, and that this was real, because his dreams were never so gloriously, ridiculously messy.

After recovering a bit, he was able to pick up the papers again. Only four messages were on the third and last page: from his mother, his brother, from Jess, and from Jess and Haley's mother. He read them through his tears, talking to each person.

He felt buoyed by confidence, by hope. By a sense that people knew what was going on, and they cared about his situation. About Jack. About _him_.

**~ o ~**

Once they were comfortably situated in a moderately priced motel near State College, once Henry was dozing in his crib with his wind-up dinosaur mobile rotating above him, JJ yanked three pages of notes from her jeans pockets and speed-dialed Dave, who sounded sleepy, but not the least bit unhappy about being roused.

"OK," she announced without preamble, "we have some pretty persuasive arguments against your Number Eight, but not quite enough to eliminate him entirely."

"God damn it," Rossi replied, but without any real rancor. "I'm looking for some irrefutable evidence here."

"I hear you," JJ said with a sigh, "and I wish I could throw you a lapful of absolutes. I'd say we're at ninety percent, Joseph G. McAfee isn't your guy. Maybe ninety-five. Bottom line, I don't know when this guy would have the _time_ to kidnap Hotch and hold him captive somewhere. He's—" She smoothed open her notes. "He's _always running_ somewhere."

"Like serials," Rossi said. "Always on the move, like sharks."

"If we had any evidence whatsoever that he's killed anyone," JJ agreed. "But Furface doesn't profile as a serial, anyway, and these don't appear to be random travels.

"He's part-time theater faculty at Hazelhurst. He consults privately in theatrical productions in four states. He has his 114," she added, in reference to the fingerprinting and criminal record clearances provided by the FBI. "We already knew that. Plus, he has spotless Act 33 and 34 clearances in-state, required because he works with kids.

"He teaches film and theatrical makeup to amateur groups and to kids in high schools. He's on the governing board of the academic enrichment center. He tutors math and science with grade school and high school kids. Parents and students both speak well of his methods and his personality. Only consistent complaint we found was that he gets pissy when people are late, and given his schedule, I can kind of understand that."

"Theater," Rossi mused. "Kids. What's his sex life like?"

JJ shrugged, not that Rossi could see it. "Apparently pretty average for sixty and unmarried. Has several girlfriends, all close to his own age, nobody serious, but a couple people hinted that he's known to place the occasional booty call. Reputation as actively, discreetly heterosexual."

She flipped a page over. "He volunteers with a group that trains therapy dogs and horses. He volunteers at two local history centers. He's a big supporter of the performing arts, he does Civil War reenactment stuff. He's an active member of Amnesty International—which could be interesting, of course, given the way we communicate with Hotch—and NORML, which is less so."

She heard Rossi's sigh. Other than their insistence on using and fighting for the legalization of marijuana, generally you couldn't find a more amiable and law-abiding bunch of scofflaws than NORML activists. "And he was a Canadian. Lots of pot activists in Canada," he said, "so that probably isn't a big surprise."

"Not really. So," she said in conclusion, "he went through New York the other week, en route to Boston for an opera gala, so he could have mailed the letter. And two of his students described him as 'quiet, a sad man,' rather than a withdrawn man. One compared him to Lincoln."

"Oh, that's terrific. He profiles like Lincoln. Must be our UNSUB."

"Well, there's no doubt that he _looks_ like Furface. And he moves kind of like him. But he's nothing like the profile, and honest to God, Dave, I don't know how he could pull it off without a Time-Turner."

"A what?"

"Time-Turner? From the Harry Potter books?"

"Sorry, JJ," the senior profiler rumbled. "I've managed—and I intend to continue to manage—to avoid both the books and the movies."

"Well, it's a device that Hermione—that's one of the kids in the books—uses so she can take more classes, ones that were held simultaneously. She goes to class, then dials time back an hour with the Time-Turner and goes to the other class."

"Huh," Rossi grunted. "And this is a good thing to do? To go to more classes? I mean, rather than it's cool to skip out of as many of 'em as you can?"

"Yes. And without a Time-Turner, I can't begin to figure out how McAfee'd have the time to kidnap anybody and care for him, unless he's part of a larger group."

Rossi sighed. "OK, let's put groups back on the table. But just until we eliminate Tina Turner Boy."

"_Time-_Turner. You're writing without your glasses on again, aren't you?"

Rossi sighed again, more explosively. "Whatever."

**~ o ~**

It was early on the morning of June 19th, a Saturday. The sun hadn't yet risen to poke even the feeblest rays into the tiny apartment that the former Norton Charpentier rented over the stable on the Hawthornes' property. If he'd adhered to his original plan, he would have been at T-minus-one-week. Instead, he'd already had Prisoner in his possession for 36 days.

And now, Prisoner had his messages that Warden had printed from the activists' web site.

Ordinarily, Norton Charpentier could control his urges. He had successfully mastered them for years now, because to give in to them might mean the destruction of Joseph McAfee.

Screw it. Right now, he _needed_ it.

Hands shaking in eerie but unconscious mirroring of Aaron Hotchner's trembling fingers, he jammed a flash drive into one of the USB ports on his laptop. He scrolled through dozens of folders with meaningless names holding literally hundreds of equally obscurely titled work projects, until he found the one he sought.

When he clicked on it, a box came up demanding a password. It took him three tries to get the alphanumeric right, and suddenly he had access to three video files.

All *.FLV, too, he realized. Lord, had it been that long since he'd looked at any of them? Since even before he'd bought this machine? He thrust four other flash drives in turn into another USB port, finally whimpering with relief when he found the program that converted FLV files to MP4s.

But which one?

I deserve this, he thought, almost saying it aloud. He told the program to convert all three files. The little interface informed him that he had 5:17 minutes to wait.

"Fine," he said, actually speaking aloud this time. He mopped perspiration from his forehead and told his MP3 program to start playing something. Anything.

Holy crap. Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

Truly, the stars had either taken pity on him or were laughing their cosmic asses off at him.

"And I need you now, tonight, and I need you more than ever," he sang along, his voice cracking with passion. "And if you only hold me tight, we'll be holding on forever. And we'll only be making it right, 'cause we'll never be wrong—"

He pulled a crumpled tissue from his pocket, swiped at his eyes, and blew his nose.

_Living on a powder keg and giving off sparks._

He looked around the tiny room as if someone might have joined him there. He got up, made sure the shades were pulled down on those two south-facing windows.

When he got back to the computer, the first file had been converted.

Holding the tissue over his mouth to bite back any screams of need that might erupt, he double-clicked on the first file.

She was a surpassingly beautiful child with twin auburn ponytails and a secret smile, slowly rotating back and forth in a swivel chair. "But I can," she insisted into the camera. "And the hardest part, too. Just listen: 'Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes; Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes.'" Her giggle of triumph was enchanting. "You gots to give me a ice cream now!"

He would have given his arms, his legs, his sanity, to touch her precious little body.

_So beautiful!_


	20. Forms of Interrogation

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Still in the middle arcs of this booger. So very very grateful to those of you who take the time and trouble to give us feedback. With each review, good, bad, or indifferent, it feels a little less like we're dropping these chapters into a bottomless void, completely unnoticed by the world in general. **Thank you, everyone who takes the time to comment! **

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty**

**Forms of Interrogation**

He felt at once weaker and stronger than he had since he first arrived in this miserable metal box. On the one hand, he missed his son, his family, his Team, more than he could express. On the other hand, their love, their encouragement, had stiffened his spine. The recollection of other survivors he had interviewed while he was with the Bureau reminded him that as bleak as his life was here, he had more control over his environment than many of them had ever known.

He had curled his messages from home into a tubular shape and used it to line the plastic tumbler that held his pens and markers. He suspected that if he kept them in sight, Warden might decide to take them back as punishment for—whatever the hell pissed Warden off the next time he flipped out.

He'd dozed for a while, he'd eaten the last of his peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches, a meal now as boring as it was unpalatable. He'd washed and shaved, and now he sat on his chair, using his cot as a table, and carefully measured pieces of legal pad paper against a cardboard template and sliced them with a razor blade.

He was dealing responsibly with the boredom issue. He was creating a homemade deck of cards.

_Whine. Rattle_.

_Shit_. He scrambled to stow his scraps of paper someplace Warden would be unlikely to look if he decided to do a cell search. He'd known Warden would be back before long. He'd said when he left the messages that he'd be back with supplies, and to discuss legal issues.

Legal issues. Aaron was more interested in personal issues, like: if Nortie's wife, Diana, left him because he was convicted of conspiracy to create kiddie porn—which was the charge, and not actually child molestation—then if the charge had really been withdrawn, why hadn't she returned to him? Warden might refer to his wife in the present tense, but his eyes had given him away when Aaron had mentioned her.

She had not returned.

Face it, women generally had a sense about that kind of thing. Not Warden's twin sister, the one who'd been married to one of the leaders of the conspiracy. She had a weird nickname that Hotchner couldn't recall to save his life. It was something like "Tesla" but not Tesla, and she had done the whole stand-by-your-man routine, up to and including participation in the throwing of Warden and whozit, the parts guy, under the bus.

Huh. The parts guy was the only one who'd avoided conviction, and apparently Warden had had his conviction reversed. So maybe the sister whose nickname wasn't exactly "Tesla" had recanted?

"Are you awake?" Warden called.

Aaron sighed and admitted that he was.

The window slid open. "What's your name?" Warden asked.

"Prisoner," Aaron said. He turned in his chair and looked through the window. Seeing the strained, distracted look—an expression that often seemed a harbinger of trouble—on his captor's face, he added, "Sir."

"And my name?"

"The one you were born with, or the one I'm supposed to call you?"

Norton Charpentier's bland, average features darkened. "I know the name I was born with," he replied icily. "What are you to call me?"

The cranky half of Aaron Hotchner wanted to say,_ Well, you also know what I'm supposed to call you, _but he restrained his tendency toward snark.

_Keep it respectful. It's a meal ticket, nothing more._ "Warden, sir," he replied, probably a lot less meekly than he might have.

"Your statements."

As always, Aaron kept his gaze on the placards where his statements were printed out rather than make any attempt to connect with Nortie while he recited that crap.

"You read your messages?"

"Yes, sir." He didn't have to fake the gratitude in his voice. Warden could have read them to him, or just told him, _Your friends say so-and-so_. He had sent them instructions on how to reply to him—apparently in some detail, with the stuff about disguising image backgrounds—and had taken the trouble to print them out and hand them over so Aaron could read them over and over again. He could never minimize the kindness involved in that gesture.

"We're doing something new this time," Warden said. "We're having an education session. Move your chair under the window, the back toward this wall."

Aaron stood up and relocated the chair. As he neared the window, he saw that Warden's face was beyond drawn; his eyes were red-rimmed. Something was up, and it was big, and Aaron was pretty sure that he wasn't going to like it.

"Sit down in the chair," Charpentier commanded. When Aaron complied, he said, "Raise your hands over your head and stick them out the window behind you."

Even before Warden tightened the cuffs around his wrists, Aaron realized while it would be nice, in a way, to be able to sit when talking to his captor, to have their eyes on the same level, that there was nothing comfortable about the position. He felt desperately vulnerable and he gave himself fifteen minutes, tops, before his hands went numb and his shoulders cramped up.

"May I speak long enough to thank you again for the—"

"No."

_OK, what the hell changed in the past few hours? I know I don't need a haircut yet._

Warden moved around in the anteroom for three or four minutes, then the electronic locks snicked and the door opened. Warden entered the room, unburdened by any hand trucks or even any cartons of resources. He wore jeans and a light green knit golf shirt under a pale tan nylon jacket.

Hotchner shifted positions as subtly as he could as his captor settled himself down on the cot and glanced around the cell. To his horror, Charpentier produced his Enforcer from the pocket of his jacket and set it on the cot close by his right hand.

"All right, let's begin," Warden said. "Tell me, what section of the _Model Rules of Professional Conduct_ covers misconduct?"

Aaron stared at him with something approaching disbelief. At last he said, "Eight point four."

"How many clauses are in that section?"

_What in hell brought this on?_ He tried not to scowl. "Six."

Annoyed, Warden said, "Six, what?"

"Six...point oh?"

Warden glared. "Respect, Prisoner."

Aaron sighed. He tried to wrap his fingers around the rod to take some of the stress off his wrists. "Six, sir."

"Better. And of which specific clause or clauses are you guilty?"

The lawyer took a deep breath. "None, sir."

Charpentier picked up the Enforcer and tapped it suggestively against his own forearm. "Would you care to revise that answer?"

Aaron blinked, swallowed, but held his ground. "No, sir."

"Recite clause (d) of Section 8.4 to me, Prisoner."

The problem with trying to grasp the rod was that it engaged muscles he really didn't want engaged, increasing the stress on his rib cage and diaphragm. _Isn't this how crucifixion kills you?_ He tried to keep a respectful attitude. "'It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.'"

Warden continued playing with the Enforcer. Aaron found his gaze moving almost hypnotically between the weapon and the man's face. "Define the phrase 'prejudicial to the administration of justice.'"

"That's difficult to do."

Warden scowled. "I may not have gone to law school, but believe me, I've had plenty of time to study this aspect of law extensively. So don't bother with trying to bullshit me. Well?"

"Warden, there's no single definition."

"No easy, canned definition, you mean. Very well, use your own words, then."

He'd been in this position no more than a few minutes and already he really, really hated it. He tried to keep his expression bland and his voice even, but it was a losing battle. "An act prejudicial to the administration of justice," he began carefully, "is either some kind of improper act, or the failure to take proper action, on the part of an officer of the court—one that seriously and, um, adversely affects the outcome of a case."

"And prosecutors, of course, are officers of the court."

He thought, _Ya think?_

He said, "Yes, sir."

"And which Model Rule covers the special duties of a prosecutor?"

_Where is he going with this?_ "Three point eight."

Warden folded his arms as one who has just scored huge points in a debate. "Cite me the specific clause of which you are clearly guilty."

Hotchner took a breath as deep as his awkward position would allow. He slid his hips forward a little on the seat of the chair, creating more of a straight line between his diaphragm and his arms. "Sir, I—I can't do that."

His features stony, Charpentier flicked on the power to the Enforcer. "And why not, Prisoner?"

Aaron stared at the device, momentarily mesmerized by its powerful hum, then shook his head slightly to clear it. "Because, Warden, I haven't violated that Rule."

His intense blue eyes riveted on Hotchner's, Charpentier raised the Enforcer and slowly, deliberately slid up the control that increased the intensity of its output. He kept his voice low, almost gentle. "Cite clause (d) of Rule 3.8."

Aaron tried to keep his horror and desperation off his face. 'The prosecutor in a criminal case shall make timely disclosure to the defense," he said, each word harder to speak than the last, "of all evidence or information known to the prosecutor that tends to negate the guilt of the accused or mitigates the offense—Warden, could you please cuff me standing up?"

"No. Continue."

He drew another breath.

_Part of this is psychological; I haven't been in this position long enough yet for it to have any measurable physical effects, right?_

He gave up trying grab the rod or the sill of the window and just let the cuffs bite into his wrists. Breathing was instantly a little easier.

"Continue," Warden repeated.

_Where the fuck was I?_

"Um, of all evidence—all evidence or information known to the prosecutor that tends to negate the guilt of the accused or mitigates the offense, and in connection with sentencing, disclose to the defense and to the tribunal all unprivileged mitigating information known to the prosecutor, except when the prosecutor is relieved of this responsibility by a protective order of the tribunal.'"

Warden beamed at him, and it wasn't a happy smile. It was pure predation. "And did you ever—_ever_—receive such a protective order, Prisoner?"

"No, sir."

"Then you admit your guilt."

Hotchner struggled to maintain his composure. "Absolutely not, sir," he panted, his legs shifting again, searching for a way to ease the strain on his upper body.

Charpentier rose to his feet, brandishing the Enforcer.

"Goddamn sonofabitch," Hotchner panted, his fury warring with his fear and—at least for the moment—winning the battle. "you were fucking _convicted_, Nortie! _Deal with it_. You maybe got a new trial, but that doesn't make you innocent! I don't see Diana coming back to you, do you? Women _know_ these things! Most of them are pretty good at learning the signs as soon as they figure out that it might be a problem, and most of them aren't like your nutbag sister. Diana isn't letting the kids get anywhere near you, is she? What was her first big clue, Nortie?"

Charpentier fell on him with a roar, the cattle prod held low, going for the ribs.

Aaron Hotchner was not constructed to sit passively and let some kiddie-porn merchant take free shots at him. He raised his knees toward his chest and as the man reached him, he kicked out with all the strength he had left in his body after weeks of those fucking peanut butter and honey sandwiches. His stocking feet caught Charpentier in the diaphragm, knocking the wind out of him and sending him pinwheeling backwards. _Yeah. Let's see how you like it, porn-boy!_ The Enforcer spun out of his hand and bounced along the floor, landing in front of the door.

The edge of the cot caught Nortie at the backs of his knees and he sat down hard with a loud grunt, but momentum was not his friend at that instant, because his head kept right on going and slammed against the metal wall with a weirdly dull _thunnggg_ that made his expression go slack.

Aaron watched as Charpentier hovered on the edge of losing consciousness, hoping the little creep was dead even if it meant his own death, rather sooner than later.

_Die, you miserable controlling fuckwad!_

Luck wasn't with him, though. Warden recovered himself. He rubbed the back of his head and the back of his neck with one unsteady hand, and as the fire returned to his eyes it was all focused on Aaron.

"You will regret that," Warden said when he stopped wheezing, his voice far too steady, too confident, to make Aaron feel that he'd won anything in this round. "You've been told never to mention her name, and I don't believe that you're a stupid man."

Hotchner found that he had nothing to say. He watched with a weird silent detachment as Warden stood up, as he dusted his jeans. As he wobbled over to the door and recovered his Enforcer. As he took out his little door-opening device. As he left the room. As the door shut.

He heard his captor's tread on the concrete floor outside the cell. Felt the man's fingers tangle in his hair, pulling him back, and before Hotch could get his own fingers anywhere near the throat of his tormentor, the Enforcer slammed up against the underside of his jaw, up against the salivary glands and lymph nodes.

Fire tore through his body and he arched helplessly. For what felt like an eternity, nothing but the pain existed. He felt himself trembling on the knife's edge of unconsciousness, yearned for it, prayed for it, would have begged for it if he'd been able to speak, but then he sagged back into his chair, his own head bouncing against the wall in a freakish mirror of Warden's.

While he was still incapable of movement or thought, he felt the cuffs falling from his wrists. He tumbled forward in the chair, saw the floor heaving up toward his face.

_Felt nothing._

**~ o ~**

She held her head perfectly as the cameras flashed: her jaw just slightly elevated to disguise the first hints of a double chin, her gaze slightly to the right so she wouldn't have little purple galaxies in her field of vision for the next five minutes.

The family from her Oklahoma home district and their cousins from Texas pumped her hand again and clutched at their red buttons and travel cups and ballpoint pens and yo-yos with _Rep. Cynthia Allgood, Your Voice in Washington_ printed on them before they vanished in a little cloud of ugly cargo shorts and comical awe.

It was Tuesday, the 22nd of June. Although Congress was not in session, she was on the job, talking up the party's positions and glad-handing any constituents who wandered into the nation's capital as part of their business or vacation plans.

It had been 38 days (she'd been one day behind the curve) since Rep. Allgood had heard that FBI agent Aaron Hotchner had been abducted. She'd presumed from the git-go that he was dead, because, come on, most people who get themselves kidnapped wind up dead, right? This had caused a couple little _frissons_ of creepiness, because in her nineteen years in government, eight of them with the DoJ, Aaron was the first murder victim she had actually known.

And it was a shame, because he'd been smart and dedicated and crazy-ambitious and, OK, definitely at least an eight on the hot scale, but, hey, c_ops die_. It comes with the territory, and Feebs are just cops in ugly suits. _You pays your money and you takes your chances._

"Ms. Allgood?" her office manager, Coral, said in her doorway. Although Coral could put any minor functionary in his or her place, when she addressed her boss, everything seemed to come out sounding like a question. "An Agent Morgan? From the FBI?" She set a plain white business card on her employer's desk with a sharp snap.

_Wow. They must really be coming up empty on clues if they're talking to _me_ about Aaron. Don't think I've seen him at all since, when was it? Fall of '97, right? That's thirteen years._

Cynthia Allgood glanced at the printing on the card and indicated the best of her three visitors' chairs. "Send him in."

_Oh, my goodness._

SSAIC Derek Morgan was pure catnip, all muscles and mocha in a skin-tight tee and a jacket tailored to look as if there was just nothing else on its agenda other than to drape perfectly over its owner's broad shoulders.

"Representative Allgood," he said with a nod.

"Agent Morgan. Won't you have a seat?"

Once he was seated and had politely declined refreshments, he smiled at her, but only with his lips. Not a real smile; a bureaucratic smile. "I'm sure you heard about the FBI agent who was abducted from his home on the fourteenth of May," he said.

"Aaron Hotchner," she replied. "Of course. Have you found—" She slammed on the verbal brakes before she could say _the body_ and quickly substituted "—anything useful yet?"

"We have," the agent said. He withdrew a piece of folded paper from an inner pocket of his jacket and set it before her. "We recently received a communication that we've established conclusively has been in Agent Hotchner's hands. It contained those words."

Cynthia opened the half-sheet and read the paragraph printed there.

_I am writing to you so you can pass the word to those concerned that I am alive and in good condition. I am serving a term in a private prison for crimes and injustices that I committed. I am being treated humanely. The length and severity of my punishment are contingent on my penitence and good behavior. Please let my family, my friends, and my colleagues know they are always in my thoughts. Assure them that I will eventually be released._

Instantly she was in investigative mode. "is this a photocopy?"

"No, ma'am, just a copy of the words."

"And who is 'you'?" she asked.

"Evidently the person the letter was addressed to—an analyst with the Bureau."

"'Private prison,'" she read. "He sounds remarkably calm about this. How confident are you that this is actually from Aaron?"

"Completely confident," Morgan assured her, although he said nothing to indicate the basis on which they'd determined that.

She was a little embarrassed to realize that she'd have preferred for Aaron to be dead. It would have been simpler. Tidier. Less—well, less _nightmarish_.

She folded the sheet again so she wouldn't have to look at that apparent obscene acceptance of a lunatic fate. _It really would be better__ if he were dead; __captivity will kill his spirit, maybe already has_. Trying to keep her voice calm and professional, she said, "How can I help you, Agent Morgan? I haven't had any contact with Aaron in over a dozen years."

Morgan's bureaucrat's smile might have seemed sunny to someone who wasn't constantly under public scrutiny, but to Cyn Allgood it was no warmer than it had been the first time. It never got anywhere near his eyes. "It's called dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's," he said. "We're looking at every suspect he ever pursued and every defendant he ever tried, but we're also talking to all of his peers, from the Bureau and before. You served on four trial teams with Hotch."

"Three," she said, maybe too quickly. "We were assigned to a fourth together but my transfer back to the Southwest came through. I'm listed on some early documentation for _Moretti, Ford, et al__._, but I never spent so much as ten minutes on the case."

"Three, then." Another automatic public servant smile. "'Crimes and injustices,' the letter says," he said. "I'm not looking for a whitewash here, ma'am. We know that nobody's perfect, that everyone makes mistakes and has lapses in judgment. I'm here to ask you to search your memory for anything that anyone might have interpreted as a crime or an injustice in Aaron Hotchner's professional behavior."

"Professional behavior," she echoed, realizing belatedly she might have sounded just a little bit too relieved.

He was too sharp by half. "I misspoke myself," he said smoothly. "His professional or personal behavior. Anything, however minor, however innocent, that someone might misconstrue."

_Oh, like screwing our brains out in the stacks at the law library? When my husband and his wife both thought we were taking depositions?_

She was a professional. She neither flinched nor flushed.

"Aaron—you called him 'Hotch'?"

Morgan nodded.

"Aaron was—is—laser-guided, a one-track conviction machine," she said. "And I mean that in the nicest possible way. If you wanted justice, you wanted him on your side. He came out of law school already understanding that _silence is on his side_. You know," she said, eager to make herself clear, "when you ask a witness a question and they hesitate, if you've grown up depending on your gift of gab, like most lawyers, your tendency is to fill that silence. To say something else. And it takes years to condition yourself out of that tendency, and Aaron, he was practically fresh out of law school but he alreay knew to just—you know, _stand there_, just maybe a gentle tap-tap-tap with a finger on his opposite arm where the jury could see it, then a perfectly timed arch of his eyebrow. It said 'I'm in charge and you're failing' in terms that everyone understood. That's freaking _gold_ in a courtroom, Agent Morgan, and he came to the table with it already up and running."

Morgan's smile finally reached his eyes, but he said nothing. Just like Aaron, the FBI sonofabitch had let the silence work for him, and she'd obligingly run her mouth.

_Well, shit._

**~ o ~**

It was Saturday, the 26th day of June, the day he'd originally intended to abduct Aaron Hotchner, the man who had now occupied the cell in the bunker for six weeks and one day.

"Are you awake?" he called, and for the first time in a long time, the first time since, well, the first time he'd left his prisoner alone, he was fearful. He had wondered for days whether the man was still alive.

"I am," the feeble voice replied.

The former Norton Charpentier breathed a silent sigh of relief and slid the window open.

Aaron Hotchner, gaunt from a week with no new resources, gazed up at him from his cot. His cell was tidy. His hair was brushed and his jaw was clean-shaven; he'd managed to continue to obey all of the rules.

"Come here," Norton said.

His prisoner struggled upright and approached the window, his expression one of caution and curiosity.

"I'm sorry," he croaked.

It wasn't what Norton was expecting him to say.

"Never mind that now," he said, and thrust a thermos, a Styrofoam bowl, and plastic cutlery at him. "Eat this. Eat slowly; don't make yourself sick."

Ever the ingrate, Prisoner eyed the thermos suspiciously. "What's in it?"

Charpentier recalled a goofy game he'd played with his daughter, seeing who could come up with the weirdest and grossest foods. _A pineapple, piano, and diaper sandwich_ was the one he recalled best. They'd laughed about that one for days.

He wasn't in the mood for laughter now.

"Beef barley soup," he replied. "There are biscuits in the bag. Eat. I'll be back in two hours, and we'll talk. Eat slowly. Take your time."

He closed the large window and slid the tiny one open, the one beside the boombox.

He surveyed the CD cases scattered there and selected an all-star, gala performance of _Die Fledermaus_. Whether his prisoner understood German or not, surely the bubbly melodies and gay rhythms would buoy his spirits a bit as he filled his belly.


	21. Twenty Questions, Part One

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Still in the middle arcs of this booger. So very very grateful to those of you who take the time and trouble to give us feedback. With each review, good, bad, or indifferent, it feels a little less like we're dropping these chapters into a bottomless void, completely unnoticed by the world in general. **Thank you, everyone who takes the time to comment! **

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-One**

**Twenty Questions, Part One  
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His errands took longer than he'd expected, and by the time he returned to the bunker, the CD player was on the last act of Fledermaus, the Vengeance trio. He shut it off regretfully—the trio was a favorite of his—and slid the window open to observe his captive. The empty thermos had been rinsed out and now rested on the shelf upside down, draining dry. Prisoner sat on his bunk. He had evidently been writing on one of his legal pads.

Charpentier directed the lawyer to place his chair in its proper position and to seat himself the way he had when Norton gave him the haircut, tying his ankles to the legs of the chair, but this time, he directed him to cuff his hands behind him.

There was a long and terrible hesitation. Charpentier could sense the man's fear. "I mean you no harm," he told the captive. "We need to talk face to face. You don't want your arms cuffed above you. I don't want your feet where they can kick me. This is a compromise."

With a bleak expression, the prisoner wrapped his arms around the back of the chair and clicked the bracelets onto his wrists, demonstrating that they were secured properly.

Charpentier opened the electronic locks and entered the cell. He wrapped the circle of canvas and Velcro around his prisoner, then gripped the back of the chair and wrestled it around ninety degrees so it faced the cot. He sat down and smiled.

"Are you comfortable?" he asked.

Prisoner studied him intently. "As comfortable as I'm likely to get."

"Did you enjoy the soup?"

"It was good," Prisoner replied. "I appreciated it."

"It's too bad you had to go on reduced rations for so long," Norton said, "but you can't deny that you were disobedient and disrespectful and you needed discipline."

His prisoner said nothing. He just sat there, his face a mask. Anything approaching rapport that they might have shared was lost.

"I don't always have complete control over my schedule. In a perfect world, I could have returned earlier—but this isn't a perfect world, so it was a week. Perhaps you'll consider that the next time you decide to be defiant."

The lawyer continued to regard him impassively.

"Anyway, this is a special occasion," Norton said. "It's the lunar anniversary of my conviction for conspiracy to manufacture and distribute child pornography." He met Prisoner's eyes with his own. "I'm not here to plead my case again. The courts have adjudicated that to my satisfaction, although they blamed the wrong lawyer."

A spark of something gleamed in his captive's eyes. _Surprise, surely, but…dismay, perhaps, too?_

"A lunar anniversary," he went on, "is the period during which both Sun and Moon are in the same signs in the heavens that they were when something else occurred. In my case, these are actually two anniversaries, that of my conviction in 1993, and my daughter's birth, Elinor's birth, in 1985. For both occasions, Sun was in Cancer and Moon was entering its Full phase in Capricorn. You are aware, are you not, that when Moon is full it's located in the sign opposite to Sun's on the zodiac?"

Prisoner shook his head silently. He looked bemused and trapped.

"Well," Norton said with a small smile, "consider yourself better informed now. Although Moon travels through all twelve signs during each Sun sign of the year, a specific Full Moon, like a Capricorn-to-Cancer, generally happens once a year. So—a lunar anniversary. It lasts a little over two days."

_Whenever I speak of the order of the heavens, he gets that lost, shut-down look on his face. He just isn't open to any reality but his own_.

_Very well, Prisoner. Let me seize your full attention._

"Today is June 26th," he announced. "It's a Saturday. You have been in this cell for 43 days. It is now—" He consulted his watch. "Ten minutes until nine in the morning. My original intent was to seize you early today, at the Four-Star Car Wash, where you take your van on the final Saturday of every month."

_Mission accomplished_. Prisoner's eyes were locked on his face.

"Obviously, an interesting opportunity presented itself while I was still performing my initial surveillance, so—here you are."

Prisoner's face was a mask, but his fascination shone in his eyes.

"And so, in observation of this triple lunar anniversary, we're having a very special education session," he concluded. "You may ask me any question you please. I'm committed to giving the most accurate and responsive answers I can manage. I reserve the right to refuse to answer, but you may ask anything. In return, I can ask anything of you. We'll take turns. It will be marvelously civilized, like a happy little question party."

"And am I allowed to refuse to answer?" Prisoner rasped, apparently unamused by Norton's description.

Norton studied the man in the chair for a long moment. "We'll see," he said. "Once I've seen whether there's a pattern to your refusals, that could change. Are you ready?"

"Yeah."

"Respect?"

Prisoner didn't bother to repress his sigh. "Yes, sir."

"And I could do without the sighs, Prisoner."

Prisoner glared. "Yes, sir."

"Good. Me first. Accurately, completely, responsively. Why did you apologize to me when I arrived this morning?"

Prisoner compressed his lips into a long thin line and appeared to be in thought for a few seconds, then nodded slightly. "When you were here—before, about a week ago, I think—I kicked you. I insulted you. I accused you. But when you got up from the cot, the only thing you accused me of was mentioning—a certain person."

_Really_? Norton could barely recall anything but his incandescent fury. He resisted the impulse to ask further questions and waited to see whether his captive had anything else to say.

"So I've been thinking about that a lot over the last few days," Prisoner continued, studying Norton as acutely as Norton studied him. "And I believe that the only thing that could trigger that depth of anger, of grief, would be if—if that person is deceased rather than just absent. And if that's what's going on, if that's the context, then the things I said about her absence were horrible. Cruel and unnecessary. So I apologized."

Norton could only stare, although he wasn't sure why he should be so surprised that a man whose life revolved around observing and interpreting behaviors should observe him so very astutely.

"Diana is dead," Charpentier affirmed, his voice—his spirit—heavy. "And I probably will never recover from that loss."

_Should I continue? Should I give more information? Technically, he hasn't asked me, so—why should I volunteer anything else?_

"Then, again, I'm sorry," the man in the chair said. "I was out of line."

"Your turn," Norton said.

Prisoner nodded. "Not so much a question as—as a request. When you came up behind me and shocked me under the jaw, it—it damaged my salivary glands, and for some time after you left, when I tried to eat, especially if it was something spicy like the Slim Jims, it caused a lot of pain. I know that if I hadn't stopped you from hitting me in the ribs, it wouldn't have happened, but—please, don't shock me there anymore."

"Your ribs?" Charpentier echoed. "I was aiming for your groin."

Prisoner blinked several times. "OK, then, in that case I take it all back. The jaw thing is definitely preferable to that."

"So you weren't apologizing for kicking me?"

Prisoner shook his head slowly. "No, sir. That was a defensive reflex and I'd probably do the same thing if the same circumstances came up." He engaged eye contact. "Especially now that I know what you were aiming for. _Sir._" His voice was devoid of both humor and irony.

Norton smiled. "Hence your legs tied to the chair."

Prisoner started to sigh, thought better of it and said nothing further on that subject.

"My turn for a question. How much food did you have to get through the last few days? I know you're pretty careful with your resources."

Another deep breath, this time a sign of discomfort. "When you left, I'd already had the last of my sandwiches—which I hate, by the way. Those things are foul."

"Peanut butter is a good source of protein," Norton countered, "and honey is a natural source of healing, nature's own antibiotic. Whole wheat bread is rich in fiber. Continue."

"Well, they're disgusting. Especially after, what did you say it was? Forty-three days of that crap? So no loss there. But I had, ah, a few oranges and apples, some carrots, most of the cheesy cracker things, a pack of cupcakes, some of those Little Debbie things with the white frosting and the sprinkles, and nine Slim Jims." Before Norton could comment, his captive added, "I'm down to one apple and a pack of cheesy crackers."

_He must like the Slim Jims; it's the only item he volunteered an exact number for_.

"And your water and juice?"

"I have half a bottle of juice and three bottles of water left. I was starting to wonder exactly how bad the water in the sink really is."

"I can't quantify it," Norton confessed, "but I don't recommend it. At the very least you'd spend a lot of time on the crapper. At worst, you'd lose hydration and electrolytes faster than you could replace them."

Prisoner nodded slowly and whispered, "OK. Useful to know." After a beat, he added, "So. Is it, ah—is it my turn now? Sir?"

"It is."

Prisoner gazed distractedly at the floor for almost a full minute, and then spoke slowly. "You said, when you came in this morning—" He shook his head. "It's strange to know the time of day after so long," he said in wondering tones. "Anyway, you said that the courts adjusted your standing to your satisfaction. How did they adjust it?"

_Answer that, or duck it?_ There were aspects of that situation that Prisoner absolutely had to recover on his own. How far could he go?

"All charges were dropped," he replied stonily. "My record was expunged. At my request, my fingerprints were removed from the databases. The court awarded me $224,000 for malicious prosecution and false imprisonment."

Holy crap, _that_ got Prisoner's attention. He gasped. He gaped at Norton like an idiot.

"That's impossible!" he said.

"That's entirely possible," Norton replied, exerting a substantial effort to keep himself calm and retain his dignity. "And very shortly I will be delivering the trial transcripts to you so you can track down your sins independently."

"Was it your sister's testimony?" Prisoner blurted. "Did she recant?"

Norton gave a bitter laugh. "Tiska? No, for all I know, Tiska is as blind as she ever was to what a stoat, what a deceptive piece of excrement Gerald Sinclair really is. At least at the time of my vindication she was still singing that same old song. I have no reason to believe that she's grown any wiser since then."

Prisoner looked more confused than ever. Obviously picking his words with infinite care, he said, "Warden—Mr. Charpentier—I have never, ever, maliciously or capriciously tried anyone. If we convicted you, it was on evidence that appeared compelling at the time. And as you know, the jury concurred."

"So you _do_ know how to pronounce my name."

Prisoner had the good grace to look abashed. "Yes, sir. But the fact remains that—"

"This line of inquiry is now officially closed," Charpentier said. "It can be reopened after you have had an opportunity to review the transcripts."

"But I would have been notified—"

"You heard me. This line of inquiry is closed."

Hotchner—_Prisoner_, Charpentier corrected himself—nodded and grudgingly murmured, "Yes, sir."

**~ o ~**

Early Saturday morning, the BAU jet left Tacoma, where the Team had been since Wednesday on a child abduction case. They'd both won and lost in that they'd saved one of the two children and failed to catch the second UNSUB. So, a half-and-half all the way around, although the locals remained in hot pursuit of the other perp.

After a while, Derek Morgan poured himself a cup of coffee, managing to leave just enough in the machine that he could rationalize not making a fresh pot, then he made his way down the aisle and sat down next to where Emily Prentiss was distracting herself with Angry Birds.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey, yourself." She shut down the game. Obviously, her heart hadn't been in it.

She set her tablet aside, folded her arms, and waited. Morgan glanced around, ensuring that nobody else on the Team was within easy earshot. Reid was dozing, listening to something through his earbuds. JJ Jareau was far to the front of the airplane's cabin, playing some card game with Anderson, who was on loan from the second team for the moment.

Rossi had passed on the trip, preferring to spend his time eliminating the last two people on his possibles list—which brought it down to zero, nobody a likely candidate for Furface, so maybe he didn't own a driver's license. Monday, Dave was to meet with the jarringly cheerful Hector, who—when he wasn't leading brainstorming sessions—tracked down dead people.

"I may need a little help," Morgan told her, looking past her out the window at the Montana landscape below them, all browns and reds and grays and greens and the occasional splash of blue.

Prentiss made a scoffing sound. "You're beyond help."

Derek ignored that one. "A couple of the people I interviewed this week, lawyers who used to work with Hotch, I got the distinct sense that they were holding back—and I think both of them would respond better to a female than to me if I decide they should be reinterviewed."

Instant interest. "Tell me."

"Well, there's Lily Emerson-Leland, she's a judge down in Newport News. She served on two or three trial teams with Hotch, and it's like she's completely closed down. She barely recalls the cases and only has a vague recollection that Hotch was tall. She was a federal prosecutor for fifteen years, she tried a lot of cases. I've seen some of the face sheets of these cases, and I can kind of understand what's going on. There's usually a bunch of defendants, a bunch of lawyers, and a witness list a mile long. Put that together with too much pressure and too little sleep, and stuff gets lost."

"Cognitive, you think?" Emily suggested.

"Couldn't hurt. She seemed positive enough, willing to be helpful. But she spent most of her DoJ career shuttling between D.C. and New York City, so she's done some huge cases."

"As in famous?"

"Sure, famous, too. But casts of thousands, like they say." Derek sipped his coffee. "She's a sharp lady; I'm sure stuff will start coming back to her if you can get her into a nonstressed kind of place for an hour or so."

Emily fished around in her bag for a package of chocolate candies. "Want one?"

"No, thanks."

She unwrapped a candy lazily. "Person number two?"

"Cynthia Allgood, a congresswoman from Oklahoma. Three trials with Hotch. She's definitely hiding something, some suspicion. It might be personal. I got her far enough along that I could tell she was tap-dancing her ass off to avoid talking about it, maybe even to avoid thinking about it. But I couldn't seal the deal. Again, I think she might open up more to a woman."

"Morgan." Emily's voice was low, amused.

"What?"

"Oh, come on, Morgan! Do I have to spell it out? They were screwing him."

"What, _Hotch_?" He stared in surprise at Prentiss. "Listen, I've known that man, worked with him, sometimes 24/7, for eight years now. I've spent more time with him than—than Haley ever did." He dropped his voice. "He keeps it in his pants, Prentiss. We always know where he is, and he isn't out playing around."

Emily leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. "And he wasn't always Bureau," she said with a sigh. "Remember what Rossi said about St. Aaron? About getting over the idea that Hotch didn't make mistakes?"

"I get it," Morgan growled at her. "I know he isn't perfect. Hell, I've called him out myself a time or two. He can be stubborn and arrogant and a pain in the ass. But he keeps it in his pants, Emily. That's a line he doesn't cross."

"Early in his career with the Bureau," Emily murmured almost sleepily, her head canted so her hair brushed ever so slightly against Derek's scalp and tickled, "Hotch was assigned to supervise security for my mom after there were—some threats."

"Didn't know that," Morgan said.

"Mm-hmm. Very young. Very responsible. Very married. Trust me, Derek, it didn't stop him. Blessed-Aaron-Ever-Virgin didn't happen until he got into the BAU and the Powers That Be were watching him closely."

Morgan felt a chill creeping up on him. "Princess, tell me that you're not—"

"Can I tell you a secret, Derek?"

_Lord, if you're about to tell me you slept with Hotch, I don't know how I'm gonna handle it…._

"Am I gonna regret this?"

She gave a low, dark laugh. "I don't know, Morgan. How much truth can you take?"

He took a long, steadying breath. "OK, hit me with it."

She laughed again, a velvety, seductive chuckle. "I think he did my mom, too, but I never got up the nerve to ask her."

_Oh, Jesus…._

**~ o ~**

_It's a Saturday. It's morning._

Aaron Hotchner, tied to a chair in a metal room, staring at the crazy pornographer with a grudge who had imprisoned him, kept coming back to those facts, seemingly so prosaic, but now so precious to him.

_It's the 26th of June. I've been here 43 days._

Commonplaces of life, stolen from him for so long, now presented matter-of-factly by his captor. His captor who was, like Aaron, a widower.

_Who had been cleared of all charges? Who had won a settlement for malicious prosecution?_

That was simply impossible. There would have been hearings. Charges.

He shifted in his restraints. He was probably as comfortable as he was going to be, all things considered, but he hated feeling helpless.

"My turn to ask a question," Warden said. He was still in this weirdly chatty mode, as if this version of an education session made them best buddies. "What do you think of the music I play?"

_It sucks, for the most part,_ Aaron thought.

"It's OK," he said. "I can tune it out most of the time."

Charpentier looked disappointed. "Tune it _out_?"

"Sorry," Aaron said, more as a matter of form than because he felt any remorse. "I'm not much of a classical music fan. I don't have any training in that field. I mean, I appreciate what you're doing, playing the music. It's pleasant to hear something other than the sound of my own breathing and the buzz of the lights. Most of it, I guess it's less tuning it out than just letting it—wash over me."

"So you have no favorites?"

"Favorites? The pop albums you play sometimes. Abbey Road. Glass Houses. Joshua Tree."

Charpentier simply couldn't let it go. The music obviously meant a lot more to him than it did to Hotchner. "Then there's nothing you actively dislike, ether?"

"Dislike? Hell, yes. Whatever symphony has that thing that—it just goes on forever, sounds like, like 'jackbooted thugs,' I always see the marching hammers from _The Wall. _I hate that thing."

He waited for Warden to leap in and defend the piece, but instead he beamed hugely. "Oh, well done," he said. "Wonderful ear! You may not be trained, but you have great musical instincts. That's precisely what you're hearing there. That movement represents the Nazi invasion of Leningrad. If you listen, you can even hear subtle echoes of the _Deustchlandlied, _you know—_" _He sang, "'_Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt.' _Next time you hear it, listen for that._" _

Aaron Hotchner sagged in dismay. _Great. Now it's a music appreciation class._

He had no interest in this bullshit. He wanted to get back to the facts of Norton Charpentier's life, and if he refused to discuss his trial or his alleged vindication in a straightforward way, then Aaron would have to nibble around the edges of it and try to get his answers sideways.

"My turn to ask a question?"

Warden seemed a little disappointed to be sidetracked from his music appreciation lecture, but he nodded. "Go ahead," he said.

Hotch considered his words carefully. "When you came back, a few hours after you gave me the messages from my friends and family," he began, "you seemed to be—distressed. As if you got bad news or experienced a, a setback."

Warden studied him through narrowed eyes for what seemed like forever, then stood up. "I probably shouldn't show you this," he said quietly, "but perhaps this is a good time, after all."

He used his little magnetic device to open the door—and left it open, tantalizingly open, just hanging there on its hinges not two feet from Aaron, and if he hadn't been in cuffs and bound to the chair, he could have strolled right out, taken down that miserable dickwad Charpentier, and made his way to the surface. He fought back tears of frustration because he felt _that close_ to freedom.

When Warden returned, he carried a large Toshiba laptop with a 17-inch screen. He booted it up—it ran Windows; both Aaron and the BAU used the Mac system—and clicked his way through a series of folders, finally double-clicking on one file. "Because you had your note from your little boy, I let myself watch this."

The screen filled with an image from a video camera, date-stamped in the lower right corner as _08:46 AM_ _17 April 1990_, and showing an office of some kind. A pretty little girl with her hair in twin ponytails rotated back and forth in an office chair and grinned at the camera. "But I can," she said confidently. "And the hardest part, too. Just listen: 'Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes; Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes.'" She giggled. "You gots to give me a ice cream now!"

And a voice that Aaron recognized as Norton Charpentier's said, from close to the camera, "For breakfast? Mommy'll chase me with Ben's bent broom!"

"Nuh-uh," the little girl replied. "Ben's bent broom breaks!"

"—the both of you!" a woman's voice finished. Whatever she'd said first hadn't registered in the audio, but she was laughing. "You're making me sneeze. Ha-choo! Ha-choo!" The sneezes were loud and obviously faked.

"Nuh-uh!" the little girl called. "No such thing as 'lergic to _Fox in Socks." _

"Oh yes there is," her mother replied. "It makes me sneeze. Ha-choo! Ha-choo!"

Hotch stole a glance at Warden and saw that tears were streaming down his face. As the camera turned and focused on a very pregnant Diana Charpentier, Norton bent over and closed the video window, surreptitiously wiping at his eyes.

"That's Ellie," Aaron said.

"That's Ellie," Warden confirmed. "That's my little golden girl." He avoided Hotchner's gaze.

"How many kids do you have?"

There was a long, painful hesitation. When he spoke, Warden's voice was as bleak as any man's voice could be. "None," he said. "Di had three late-term miscarriages. Jason was three months premature and only lived 37 hours. That night—Elinor was in the car with Diana."

He finally looked straight into Aaron's face and his eyes burned with despair.

"And I was at the federal penitentiary at Marion. In solitary confinement."


	22. Twenty Questions, Part Two

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Still in the middle arcs of this booger. So very very grateful to those of you who take the time and trouble to give us feedback. With each review, good, bad, or indifferent, it feels a little less like we're dropping these chapters into a bottomless void, completely unnoticed by the world in general. **Thank you, everyone who takes the time to comment! **

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-Two**

**Twenty Questions, Part Two**

"_And I was at the federal penitentiary at Marion," Warden had said, just a moment before. "In solitary confinement."_

Charpentier sat down heavily on the cot next to his laptop and regarded Aaron with tired, sorrowful eyes.

"So," Hotchner said, picking his words with care, "do you hold me responsible for the deaths of your loved ones?"

Charpentier continued to look at him, or possibly through him, for a few seconds, then said, "It isn't your turn to ask a question."

_Maybe he's lying, _Aaron thought hopefully._ Maybe they're still alive somewhere and this is a game he's playing with my head. He seems truthful, but he sounded completely sincere when he told me there was a bomb at Jess's place, too._

"OK," he said.

"But on the other hand, that's too important a question to leave hanging," Charpentier said. "The answer is no. If I held you responsible for the death of my wife and daughter, I'd be killing you, not staying up late making sandwiches for you to complain about."

He offered a brief, meaningless little smile, then picked up his laptop, started the shutdown, and set it aside to complete the process. He seemed to be looking around the cell as though he had never noticed it before. When he looked at Hotchner again, his expression was chilly.

"Will you repeat for me the statement you made to Mr. Van der Weese, Ms. Allgood, and Mr. Farinelli in the lobby of the Federal Building, on the occasion of the death of our infant son, Jason, in May of 1993?"

_OK, this is a dream, this is a dreadful dream, it has to be; there's no way he could possibly have heard that…._

"And don't try to deny it or make something up," Charpentier added dryly. "My brother-in-law and his wife were standing directly behind Mr. Farinelli at the time."

_Oh, God…._

"I—I don't recall what I said," he replied, and his tone was even, honest, straightforward—but undercut by the fact that he had flushed deep scarlet. "I mean, I know I was out of line, but I don't recall my exact words."

"You're lying." Charpentier said it casually, but with confidence. "How does that joke go about how you can tell when a lawyer is lying?"

As if it weren't bad enough to be bound to a chair in a cell by a man who had either suffered greatly or lied like a master—or both—was he now to be held accountable for the stupid and thoughtless thing he had said, just off the cuff, seventeen years earlier?

"May I put what I said into perspective?"

Charpentier's hollow-eyed gaze did nothing to ease his discomfort. "Perspective?" he echoed.

"Please," he said, keeping his voice as quiet and respectful as he could. He was in dangerous territory here, because he remembered exactly what he'd said, and exactly how awful it was. His companions—George Van der Weese, in particular—had verbally slapped him down for it immediately. It ranked among his most embarrassing moments.

"I'm listening."

"I was young, I know that's no excuse, and a lot less empathetic than I am now—that was something I had to learn, I didn't pick it up at home—and you have to understand, I didn't want children. I didn't even particularly _like_ children, other than my brother. And I shot my mouth off. And it wasn't clever; it was inexcusable. And the people I was with, the people I looked up to and wanted to impress—they tore me a new one right on the spot, and if your brother-in-law was there, he must have heard that, too—"

"He did," Charpentier confirmed. "Lead attorney called you a slick asshole with no soul."

He was flushing again, cringing with shame. There was no way around it. His careless words had found their way back to the one person he had never intended to hear them.

And here he was, entirely at that person's mercy.

_Talk about fucking karma…._

"I'm so sorry," he whispered.

"Repeat for me what you said to them."

"Warden—sir—Mr. Charpentier," he said, desperate to establish some kind of rapport, "we both know what I said. It was said. It was—slapped down pretty decisively. I've apologized to you, to them. I'll apologize again if it pleases you. What earthly good can come of my saying those words again?"

"Repeat them."

He drew a breath and deliberately detached himself so that they were merely words, spoken woodenly and without meaning. "At least he won't be another home-grown kiddie-porn star," he recited. "He's better off dead."

Charpentier looked at him for a long minute, his face blank, then said, "Thank you."

The tension in the room dissipated. It was as though the act of saying the words had leached away their power to hurt him.

When Charpentier relaxed, Hotch said, "My turn?"

"Your turn."

Aaron considered his options, and decided to keep his focus on things grim and related to Norton Charpentier's past. "How did your wife and daughter die?" he asked.

His captor had already shed all his tears for the morning, apparently. His lips tightened for an instant, and then he said, "A seventeen-year-old boy crossed the center line in his daddy's SUV. It was shortly before midnight on the eighteenth of July, 1993. New Moon in Cancer, Juno—my wife, she was Juno—conjunct with Chiron. Kid had an alcohol level of point-two-seven-oh." He met Hotchner's eyes steadily. "His name was Barton Elisha McGraw, a good Christian boy, quarterback at his high school. They took away his license and made him go to counseling. I lived to kill him, Hotchner."

Realizing his error, he shook his head violently. "_Prisoner_. I lived to kill him, _Prisoner_. When everything was dark and I had nothing else to cling to, I clung to my dreams of murdering Barton McGraw. Every way there is to kill a man, fast, slow, brutal, subtle—I considered them all, in detail, at great length. Sometimes that was all that kept me alive."

He grinned, and there was little humor in it. "Three years later—I'm still in prison, it's a Club Fed by now, but it's still a prison, believe me—one of Di's brothers calls me. Barton McGraw was driving drunk again, without a license, because that kind, let's face it, they don't give a shit what the law says. He crosses the center line again in his daddy's replacement SUV. The eighteen-wheeler he hit was a lot less forgiving than Diana's Honda Civic. Chiron smack-dab on his natal Sun in his eighth house of paybacks.

"I had a new center by then, so I could let go of the fantasies," Charpentier concluded. "And I had assurances that the Universe works. That there are answers. And I believe it's my turn to ask a question."

Aaron nodded, but his mind was racing, fitting all this new information into his profile of the man who held him prisoner.

"George Foyet killed your wife," Charpentier said, "and then you killed Foyet. What was it like to kill him?"

"To tell the truth, I barely remember," Aaron Hotchner said, choosing his words with care. "He'd killed my wife. He was going to kill me, then he was going to kill my son, and I just couldn't let that happen—but a lot of it is a blur of pain and rage and, and confusion."

He was lying, and he knew it, but it was an old lie, a familiar one, one he was _good_ at telling. He'd sung that song on dozens of occasions in three or four venues prior to Charpentier's little underground cell.

There were some things he hadn't even told the counselors at the Bureau. He remembered the sensation of feeling, with every punch into that monster's face, a growing sense of empowerment, as if, blow by blow, he was taking back a little part of his life—the life that the Reaper had stolen from him months before. If he hadn't told the counselors, he was damned if he'd tell his fucking Warden.

"And that's all?"

Aaron thought about how much he dared share with the lunatic of the bunker. "There was a moment when he slammed me into a table and we both fell and I thought he'd broken my back and I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to stop him—but I recovered from it, and the last thing I remember clearly is slamming him up against the wall and looking into his eyes—" _Why the hell did I say that? I haven't told anyone that!_ "—and I saw nothing. No passion, no fire, just this distant, detached—_something_. Like he was a machine, not a man, and nothing that I said or did would mean anything to him, because he had his program and he was going to complete it."

He met Charpentier's eyes. "He wasn't a _he_ anymore. He was an _it_, and I had to stop it." He shrugged. "And that's all I remember."

Norton seemed surprised. "No sense of finality, even? Of success?"

Hotchner shook his head. "I didn't even know he was dead. They had to pull me off him. I wasn't—wasn't really aware of what I was doing.

"My turn," he added firmly, to forestall any further exploration of that subject. "Why won't you let me have an alternate light source? The power seems to go out here pretty often."

Charpentier almost rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on," he said. "Why can't you consider it an opportunity for a voyage of inner discovery?"

"Goddammit, I'm serious. Sometimes it's out for hours at a time."

"The disadvantages of rural life," Norton said with a negligent shrug.

"Regardless, most rural people have candles, Colemans, flashlights. Down here, I'm not even getting moonlight—and almost all of my assignments involve reading, writing, or both."

"That's not on the table, Prisoner, and it never will be."

"Aw, Christ—"

"Don't bother me with any further protests. The answer is no. And now it's my turn to ask a question."

Aaron wondered how Charpentier could act as though somehow they were chatting as equals and the fact that Aaron was handcuffed and secured to a chair barely counted. He supposed he should protest, but he was getting so much new information on his captor that probably it wasn't worth the trouble.

"Fine," he said. He knew he sounded sullen.

_It's Saturday morning_, he reminded himself. _It's the 26__th__ of June_. That knowledge alone was like gold.

"I see that you've begun quite a long list here," his self-styled Warden said, glancing toward the legal pad Aaron had been writing on when he arrived. "Now that I've begun to crack the code of your dreadful, dreadful handwriting, I can see that it's a list of names, followed by notes I can't begin to figure out. What kind of exercise is that?"

Hotchner shifted his shoulders a few times trying to get more comfortable. "Just some of the people my Team—my unit at Quantico—has been able to save," he answered, aiming for a casual tone. "A little reminder to myself that my life hasn't been as worthless as you'd make it out to be."

It was a lot more than that, but he was damned if he'd let Charpentier that far into his head. The alleged not-a-pornographer had spent more than enough time there already.

Warden studied him sadly. "You do me wrong, Prisoner," he said. "But—enough questions for the moment. Let me get you set up so you can free yourelf once I'm out of the room." He rose from the cot and moved behind Aaron. "Just sit very still for a moment…."

**~ o ~**

Morgan had retreated to the back of the jet's cabin, where he plugged in his earbuds, closed his eyes, and waited for Otis Redding to erase the notion of Aaron Hotchner, love machine, from his brain. It was ridiculous on the face of it. Sure, Hotch had a few private corners to his life—everyone did—but if he'd been playing hide-the-sausage on the job, he, Derek Morgan, would have caught on to it. Nobody calls out a smooth operator like another smooth operator, after all.

After a few minutes, he took out his iPad and scrolled through the images that he had stored there. Representative Cynthia Allgood was a strawberry blonde of medium height, with icy blue eyes. Her Honor, Lily Emerson-Leland, was a tall, elegant ash blonde, comfortable with the mantle of authority.

OK: Did Hotch have a "type"?

The only person who he knew with confidence to have—frolicked—with Aaron Hotchner was Haley. Haley had been an ash blonde of medium height. Quiet, whip-smart, cute laugh….

_Stop. Just look at the problem chicks. It's something else, you'll see._

OK. Cynthia Allgood, with a birth date in March of '63, making her almost 2½ years older than Hotch. Undergrad degree from University of Chicago, during which she married Ben Allgood. Yale Law. Federal prosecutor 1991-2000. Divorced Ben in '99, but kept his name. No children. Elected to State House in '02, U.S. Congress in '06. Unattached, but seeing a local widower, a mid-level functionary at Treasury, for the past year.

_Lived within a 35-minute drive of Aaron Hotchner and apparently never made any effort to renew the acquaintance. Because she was embarrassed, or because there wasn't any spark there in the first place?_

He worried an eyebrow with his free hand, and scrolled on over to Bachelorette Number Two, born Lily Emerson in December, '65, making her a month younger than Hotch. Undergrad at Yale, but skipped a couple grades as a kid so she was two years ahead of him there. Harvard Law, federal prosecutor 1991-2006, at which time she was appointed to the bench. Married U.S. Navy officer Chandler Leland in '95, three daughters. Nice-looking family, Chan built like a linebacker, rugged and square-jawed. Their girls, two pudgy blondes and a willowy brunette, flashed practiced center-of-attention smiles in the official family portrait.

There was nothing to indicate that the marriage was anything other than perfect in every way.

He powered down his iPad and closed his eyes again.

Tried hard not to picture Ambassador Prentiss.

_Thanks a _bunch_, Emily…._


	23. Impressions of Reality

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: Still in the middle arcs. So very very grateful to those of you who take the time and trouble to give us feedback. With each review, good, bad, or indifferent, it feels a little less like we're dropping these chapters into a bottomless void, completely unnoticed by the world in general. Thank you, everyone who takes the time to comment!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-Three**

**Impressions of Reality**

On a sunny Monday morning, June 28th, Aaron Hotchner's 45th day of captivity, David Rossi ventured into some of the less-fashionable real estate in the Hoover Building in central D.C.

Agent Hector Hobbes-Gutierrez had a tiny afterthought of an office that looked carved out of a piece of what might at some point have been a break room. He had a government-issue wood-grain desk, two chairs, four tall filing cabinets, a computer, and three shelves of untidily stacked reference books.

He had no window, but he had three posters of window views on his walls.

David Rossi still wanted to belt the dude for his attitude during the officially sanctioned brain-storming session back in May, but right now, he needed his expertise.

"Like I explained in my email," he said, "we've been examining and eliminating potential UNSUBs from Agent Hotchner's history." He bared his fangs in what he hoped might pass for a smile. "In the spirit of your suggestion that we 'think outside the box,' I wanted to take a closer look at six people who are listed as dead. Imagine my surprise when I learn that, in addition to your imagination-boosting exercises, you're the go-to guy for finding dead people."

Agent "Call Me Hector" Hobbes-Gutierrez reflected a toothy smile. "Which is also a job that, if you'll pardon the pun, Dave, frequently requires some thinking outside the box."

Rossi withdrew his notebook from an inside jacket pocket. "So—Hector," he said, "have you had any luck with the six names I gave you?"

Hobbes-Gutierrez tapped his keyboard a few strokes and turned toward his monitor. "As a matter of fact, I have. Do you want them in any particular order?"

"Let's start with the two that are only _declared _dead," Rossi replied.

"That sounds reasonable. Very well." Hobbes-Gutierrez frowned at his screen. "If you're trying to build a case that these people are alive, it's gonna be a tough sell.

"Jason Frederick Yablonsky," he said. "History of depression, two suicide attempts when he was still in school. Both jumper attempts. Talked off a bridge in high school, they sent him to counseling. Talked off a ledge in college, spent five months institutionalized. After his 1994 conviction for his participation in the Jurek/Margolis scam, he did three years, was on suicide watch for two of them."

He scrolled through his notes. "He gave away his car, his watch, and his music collection the week before he disappeared," he said. "He took a bus to West Virginia, then he rented a bike in Fayetteville. The bike was found early in the morning of May 5, 1999, along the shoulder of U.S. 19, about half a mile from the New River Gorge Bridge. It's huge, the fifth highest in the world for vehicular traffic. Would you like to see a picture of it?"

Rossi shook his head. "Not necessary."

Hobbes-Gutierrez shrugged. "Nobody has seen him since. I have the records here of efforts to recover his body. Apparently his mother and his sister even hired wilderness experts to locate him—or failing that, his remains. When there were no sightings and no activity was registered in his bank account, he was declared dead in 2007. Were he alive now, he would be—ah, let's see, 1968, he would be turning 42 this coming October."

"Can you forward all that data to our Tech Analyst, Penelope Garcia?"

"Certainly." He typed in a couple commands. "Done.

"Next up, Norton Waldo Charpentier," he said. "No history of suicidal ideation or depression. Convicted of participating in a kiddie-porn ring, but his conviction was overturned and he collected $224,712 for wrongful prosecution and incarceration."

"Was Aaron Hotchner responsible for the wrongful prosecution?"

Hobbes-Gutierrez frowned and scrolled for a bit. "No, the lead prosecutor, a George Van der Weese, admitted to withholding clearly exculpatory evidence. Said it was a bookkeeping error and there was no malicious intent, but he was admonished for it."

Rossi perked up. "Van der Weese is on this list, too."

"So he is. Do you want to move on to him, or shall we continue with Mr. Charpentier?"

"Please go on, Agent."

A flash of white teeth. "Call me Hector."

"Whatever."

"It seems that Mr. Charpentier thought that getting out would solve all his problems, but it didn't. He took about half of his settlement and bought himself reservations for a dream vacation in Alaska and Hawaii. He didn't make it through his first week in Alaska, though.

"He tried to rent a canoe to travel along the Noatak River in September of 1998. It's a fairly tame run, but he was advised against it, especially since he was—way out of shape. I mean _way_ out of shape, enormously fat, waddled when he walked. They wound up allowing him to purchase the canoe outright—that's a bit of evidence they weren't confident they'd see the canoe again. Would you like to see the river, and the route he was going to travel?"

"Not at this time, thanks."

"Well, at a couple places along the river, people called in sightings. One was of a fat man apparently unconscious in a canoe, and another of a fat man floating in the river. The canoe showed up the following spring. No sign of Charpentier. And—there's a bear problem along the banks from time to time. His well-chewed billfold—still containing the remains of several hundred dollars cash and several thousand in travelers' checks—was discovered not far from some well-chewed bones. The person who found the bones thought they were from a moose and disposed of them before they could be examined."

"He had a lot of money?" Rossi said.

"Sure did. He was supposed to spend two weeks in wildest Alaska, so to speak, then catch an Alaskan cruise ship, followed by a cruise to Hawaii. All paid for, never collected. Reservations for a trip to Italy at Christmastime, too. He left over a hundred grand in his bank account, too.

"His brother-in-law—Charpentier was a widower, lost his wife and daughter to an auto accident while he was in jail, but he was very close to his wife's people and was going to connect with the Hawaiian branch of the family as part of his cruise—anyhow his folks, his family, spared no effort and no expense, but he was never seen again. Pronounced dead in 2004. If he were alive now, he'd be turning 50 in November."

"Your professional take on the likelihood that either of these guys is still alive?"

Hobbes-Gutierrez made a negligent gesture. "Infinitesimal," he said. "Yablonsky was a suicide waiting to happen for most of his adult life. Charpentier had verifiable plans for his future and a supportive and loving family and didn't show up to take advantage of either of them."

"You'll also forward that to Garcia? Thanks." Rossi crossed out a second name on his list. "Van der Weese?"

The Hoover Building agent tapped a few more keys. "Well-respected state appellate judge in New Hampshire, verifiably dead in a one-car crash in Vermont, late, on a mountainous road, November of 2008. Identified by his family and fingerprints. Apparently had a heart attack while driving down toward his daughter's place in Bennington. Only flag raised was that he hadn't told her he was coming—but he was getting up there, you know, and hadn't been as reliable about things like that since his wife died in '06."

Dave turned a page in his notebook. "Althea Anne Kinker Wallace," he said.

It was, he suspected, another day of strikeouts.

**~ o ~**

Aaron was curled under the covers, lying on his left side. He opened his eyes and tried to recall the strange dream he'd had, of Warden making a brief and hurried appearance, just long enough to deposit a carton of new resources—as though he hadn't left enough after their odd little question-and-answer session on Saturday.

Saturday.

_And today is Tuesday, the 29__th__ of June_, he told himself with confidence. He rolled to his back, automatically raising an arm to shade his eyes from the overhead lights, and raised his gaze to Warden's most welcome contribution three days earlier: a digital clock of brushed metal that displayed the time and date. It hung above the photographic array on the wall beside the sink.

The only drawback was that it ticked loudly. After forty-some days of silence, the constant sound could be irritating—even maddening.

_It's 7:49:33. 7:49:34…._

In his dream, he recalled, Norton Charpentier had worn the uniform of a Union soldier in the War Between the States, with red sergeant's stripes on his biceps, a chamois ammo pouch at his waist, and a cloth kepi tucked into his brown leather belt.

He smiled. Much as he revered the Constitution and admired Abraham Lincoln, Aaron was a Virginian by birth and upbringing. His mother's family had been Virginians for a generation when that upstart Declaration of Independence was born. If he'd ever dressed as a soldier from that conflict, he'd have insisted on the gray of the Confederacy. In the neighborhood where he'd grown up, when the time came to play soldiers, everybody wanted to be a Rebel. Hotchner himself had insisted on being one of Mosby's Rangers.

He stretched and rolled over to his right side.

_Holy shit!_

A rogue carton sat along the near wall, almost beside the head of his bed. He stared at it, studied it, reached down and touched it. It was solid.

_He was really here. He left a box for me. He probably wasn't wearing a Union uniform, but he was here._

He strained to remember the details of what he had thought was a dream: He had awakened to the sound of the window sliding open, of Warden hissing _Over here, quickly! Hands! _He'd stumbled from bed to obey. Warden had cuffed his wrists, opened the door, deposited a box, then left the cell. He'd unlocked the cuffs and said, _Go back to bed_.

Confused and disoriented, Aaron had obeyed that command, too.

No _You Warden, Me Prisoner_ bullshit. No reading of those fucking statements.

_And I never heard the elevator—not even when he left._

He sat up cross-legged in bed, reaching automatically for the navy cardigan—he had two now, blue and gray (_how appropriate; no wonder I'm dreaming of the War Between the States_)—and once it was zipped, he raised the carton to rest against his shins but above the blankets.

As always, Warden had affixed a printed inventory to one flap of the box.

2 bars shaving soap  
>3 plastic coat hangers<br>2 spare uniforms  
>10-pack legal pads<br>2 paperback books  
>picture<br>your new assignment

_Am I dreaming_ now?

He plunged a hand into the carton. He seriously needed the soap; he was down to his last little sliver. Same brand again, Brunner's Cold and Hard Water Ideal, this time in vanilla and gingerbread scents.

_Hm._ Originally he had posited that Warden gave him things that smelled like food to remind him that he was living on little other than fruit, those godawful sandwiches, and occasional handfuls of junk food. Now, he wondered whether something less conscious might be at play here.

At the time of his trial, Norton Charpentier had been a whale of a man, five-seven or so, but at least 300 pounds. He had to have spent years on a severe diet and exercise regimen to reduce himself to the downright slim figure that he presented now. Maybe on some level, he was always thinking about food.

When he saw the folded scrubs, he blinked rapidly several times and yanked them out of the box, scarcely believing his eyes. One pair was mismatched, a light blue top and a dark blue bottom. The other—he spread them out, shaking his head—was a matched set of bright yellow scrubs featuring SpongeBob SquarePants.

_What the fuck?_

_OK, sorry. Definitely dreaming._

One book was a replacement for the book of poetry he had shredded during his meltdown a few weeks earlier. The other was _A Confederacy of Dunces,_ a novel he'd seen on Haley's shelves when she was in college. He could use a change of pace; he'd begun to loathe every word of the _Model Rules of Professional Conduct_, and he'd read the Bible so often that he found himself lying in bed and profiling Jacob, David—especially David, what a case—and Abraham.

The "picture" confirmed that he was, in fact, dreaming. It was a framed five-by-seven copy of the formal portrait he'd had of Jack and himself in February. He carried a smaller version of it in his wallet. He could imagine no circumstances under which (A) Charpentier could get an enlargement of the photo or (B) he would want to provide Aaron with the kind of morale boost that seeing that picture triggered in him.

_Screw it. This is a dream._

He lay back among the contents of the carton, threw his forearm across his face to shield his eyes from the ceiling lights, and tried to dream that he was going back to sleep.

**~ o ~**

As he strolled along the rural road, he basked in the fragrance of flowers, of loam and new growth. He bathed in the warmth of the sun. In the coolness of the forest beyond, he could hear birds flirting and fussing in the trees.

For his first appearance in any form of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, he had been twelve, a blubbery and insecure seventh-grader a year younger than his peers and beset by a bumper crop of pimples. It had been a school production of H.M.S. Pinafore. He had sung tenor in the chorus. At some point in the first act finale, he had been required to skip in a circle with the other "sailors."

Alas, Norton Charpentier could not skip, then or now, nor even as a preschooler. It was just another of those activities that his sister performed effortlessly, but that were closed off to him, like climbing a rope or riding a bicycle. He had managed a clumsy galloping motion that the director had wearily accepted, but he had been painfully aware of his failure to perform what was a basic activity of childhood.

Today, however, a grown man slipping past middle age, he had no trouble skipping down the road. He even had the breath control to sing lustily as he did so.

_Let's give three cheers for the sailor's bride / Who casts all thought of rank aside / Who gives up home and fortune too / for the honest love of sailor true / Tra-la-la-la…_

Sullivan spun out endless melodies eminently suited for skipping, and Norton skipped along to all of them, swinging his arms.

_On this subject, I pray you be dumb-dumb-dumb / I think you had better succumb-cumb-cumb / You'll find there are many who'd wed for a penny / Who'd wed for a penny…_

Abruptly as he skipped around a curve, the landscape shifted.

Nightfall had come here. The skies and the road were almost the same shade of gray. In the distance in all directions, the limbs of bare trees writhed like snakes. There were no stars. The moon was hidden, and yet there was a faint glow that enabled him to see. Wispy black clouds scudded overhead, and a cold wind blew right to left, riffling his hair and singing in his ear. From just below the level of the road, and just beyond its shoulder, white steam rose. The odors of overheated radiators and of burning rubber assaulted his nostrils.

A tremor shot through him, because he knew what he would see just beyond the rise.

A man doesn't back down. He zipped his jacket clear to his neck and began moving steadily, deliberately planting one foot in front of the other, until he stood at the crown of the road. Below him, in billowing, hissing clouds of steam, lay the twisted wreckage of a black '85 Ford Tempo, its undercarriage exposed, its wheels still spinning impotently, going _thunkety-chink, thunkety-chink_.

"Diana!" Norton breathed. Terror had seized him, and he was unable to utter any sound but a whisper. "Ellie!"

He stood utterly frozen in the middle of the deserted road. He felt he should run to the car and see whether his wife and daughter were still alive, trapped in their seat belts, perhaps unconscious, but he could no longer command his body to obey him.

"Diana!" he rasped impotently. "Ellie!"

From within the hell of steam and burning rubber and plastic, a figure emerged, tall and slender, slow and deliberate in his movements. Like a pitchman in a commercial for an insurance company, Aaron Hotchner stepped into full view in a sober charcoal suit and a dark tie. Confident. A faint professional smile creased his ugly, thug-browed face.

As he approached his legs gradually elongated, stilt-like, until he towered over Norton like one of the long-legged walkers that attended the Blue Meanies in _Yellow Submarine._

Norton reached for the Enforcer, but couldn't locate it. Frantic with terror, he patted his pockets, praying that his fingers would reach the cattle prod before his erstwhile Prisoner loomed directly over him.

He awakened terrified and panting, saturated in sweat, patting furiously at his torso.

_God! What the hell? I mean, aside from the fact that Diana'd been driving the Civic, not the old Tempo, we traded that in back on '88 or '89. Do I blame Prisoner for their deaths?_ He turned fretfully beneath the sheets. _If I hadn't been in prison, there'd have been no earthly reason for Diana to be driving home from Stu and Margo's at that hour of the night. She wouldn't have been up there, job-hunting. She wouldn't have _needed_ a job._

He sat up in bed and oriented himself. He was in his rented room above the stables at Ted and Bren's place. It was 6:14 in the morning on Wednesday, June 30th. There had been a glorious reenactment event the day before. Ted had driven the horse trailer to the event, but Bren and he had saddled up Champagne and Burley and had ridden most of the way, side by side, laughing and swapping jokes.

He remembered the baffled look on Prisoner's face when he saw Norton in his sergeant of artillery uniform. He wished he'd had time to stay longer, to take a measure of his captive's health and state of mind, but it was a long journey on horseback, and they'd had to leave early in the morning.

_6:15._

If he got up now, he could pay another quick visit to the man in the bunker before he had to drive to Altoona to tutor algebra and basic math.

Alternately, he could have a leisurely breakfast, drive to Altoona, tutor math, meet Ron and Lois and Frank for the therapy animal group monthly leadership meeting, drop the car off for an oil change and use the wi-fi at the coffee shop down the street to teleconference in for the Hazelhurst faculty meeting, have dinner with Bren and Ted, maybe doggy bag a little of what Bren served down to Prisoner, spend a couple hours with him, and still be in State College by eleven, time enough to do a load of laundry before he crashed in his own bed, his own small, spartan apartment.

The previous days had left him tired and sore, and although it was in a good way, it was still _tired and sore_.

_Yes, definitely—the leisurely breakfast. Plan B_.

**~ o ~**

That evening, Norton Charpentier rode the cantankerous little elevator down to the cooler temperatures of the bunker level and opened the scissor-gate.

"Are you awake?" he called.

"I am," Prisoner replied.

Charpentier was bone-weary. His math students had been lazy and unmotivated. The faculty meeting had been unexpectedly acrimonious. He had a long drive ahead of him, and both the local news and weather and Ted's arthritis predicted a broad swath of thunderstorms crossing the area within the next hour or so.

He searched for and found his game face, then shoved the little window open.

Prisoner's magenta uniform and four pairs of sweat socks were hanging on the laundry line. The SpongeBob uniform hung on one of the hangers, along with the gray cardigan. He'd been sitting on his cot in the blue uniform, writing on a legal pad, but he'd set it aside.

"What's your name?" Charpentier asked.

"Prisoner," the lawyer replied listlessly.

"And my name?"

"Warden." Charpentier stared at him stonily until he said, "Sir. Warden, sir."

"Your statements."

As always, the lawyer raised his eyes to the printed copy of the statement rather than look at him. Norton knew that the man had to have the paragraphs committed to memory by now, but he still resisted any meaningful connection when he spoke those words.

Unless he wanted something. Oh, yes, he'd sounded _so_ believable the night he'd negotiated for the privilege of sending out a letter. Eye contact, simply _dripping_ sincerity.

"Hands."

The lawyer stuck his hands through the window and fastened the cuffs on his wrists. When he had demonstrated to his satisfaction that they were secure, Norton unlocked the electronic locks and entered the cell, closing the door behind him.

"How's the clock working out for you?" he asked the man shackled to the wall.

"It's loud, but it's good to have," Prisoner responded.

Charpentier banished a momentary errant thought that he could just curl up on Prisoner's cot and take a little nap.

_Hand truck. I forgot the goddamn hand truck. It's still sitting by the shelves._

"How's the assignment coming along?"

"It's coming along," his captive replied. "I thought I'd have more than one day to complete it. I have the outline done, and—"

"You'll have more time on it. I know that—"

The lights flickered once—twice—and then flickered out.

And as he stood there in total blackness, he realized with dismay that even the device to open the door was dependent on a working power source, that he was trapped here for God only knew how long, and he blurted, "Oh, dear."

"Yeah, dark, isn't it?" his prisoner said. "I don't suppose you have a flashlight?"

"No," Charpentier sighed. He could just barely make out the faint LED display of the clock, which was battery-operated.

"A Bic? Matches?"

Norton was silent. He was damned if he would admit that he had all of those things, but out in the supply room off the main anteroom.

"Hey, no problem," his prisoner said, amusement evident in his dark baritone voice. "You can consider this an opportunity for a voyage of inner discovery."


	24. Categories in the Dark

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

**A/N 2: You're looking at the strangest of many strange chapters in this story, and certainly the lightest-hearted—and necessarily short because it's so different from most of the narrative**—**but in its own way it's an important part of the journey. We hope you enjoy it!**

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-Four**

**Categories in the Dark**

After an awkward silence of a minute or two, Norton Charpentier said, "Maybe this can be a mutual voyage of discovery. We can play Categories Three."

_Just when I thought life couldn't get any weirder_, Aaron thought.

Aloud, although he knew he'd probably regret it, he said, "What's Categories Three?"

"It's fun, and a terrific mental exercise, too. One person names a category, then gives three members of that category that start with A. Then the other person gives three, then names a new category that starts with A, then there's a third set for A. Then the next person up gives a category and names three members that starts with B. The kids play it at the Center all the time. It's a great idea. It opens up all kinds of conversations."

"It's a stupid idea," Aaron growled. "I don't need you to babysit me in the dark. I need you to leave the cell and uncuff me. I don't want to stand here against the wall for however many hours the juice is out tonight."

He heard Charpentier sigh. "Well, there's a problem," he said. "The door opener depends on a ready source of power."

_He's stuck in here, too? Oh, holy fucking shit, give me strength…._

"Then since we're both trapped, could you unlock the cuffs? You can fasten them again, just so I'm not—"

"Unless there's a special reason to do otherwise, I don't bring the handcuff key in here with me. It's an extra level of protection," his lunatic captor explained.

"I get this feeling there wasn't any special reason tonight."

"I'm afraid not." Charpentier sounded genuinely dismayed.

_Aw, Christ!_

"Excuse me for a second," Aaron said. "If we're trapped here, I'm going to sit down for a while." He extended his right leg backward, located his chair, and dragged it clumsily toward himself. It caught on something, probably one of those damn depressions in the floor, and fell over sideways.

"Here," his Warden said, and there was movement, then the edge of the chair's seat touched the backs of his legs. "Better?"

He pushed it away a few inches and sat down, his arms extended upwards, one hand grasping the bar to keep the pressure off his wrists. It wasn't perfect, and his arms would get strained after a bit, but it was better than just standing there.

"The first category," Norton said, sitting down on the cot with an audible creak, "will be pop performers. I'll name AC/DC, Paul Anka—"

Hotchner was not in the mood for games. "Who the hell is he?"

"Paul Anka? He wrote the theme to the Tonight Show. His big hit was 'Diana.' '_I'm so young and you're so old, this my darling, I've been told_—'"

"Wait, wait—this is a guy singing it to the _girl_? And '_I'm so young and you're so old_'? What the hell is this, the guy's crush on his teacher?"

There was an impatient sigh. "Don't overthink this, Hotchner."

A shock of surprise ran through him. _That's the second time he's called me by my name_.

"You're right, you're right," he said smoothly, suddenly all for playing games. "And the name of the song is 'Diana.' Great. OK, so what's your third?"

"Mm," Charpentier said. "Tougher than I thought. Gene Autry."

"I thought he was a TV cowboy."

"He also sang 'Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer.'"

"And that's a pop song how?"

Charpentier chuckled. "You're aggressive at this! It was a pop song when it came out. You're up, three pop performers, starting with A."

Aaron stared into the blackness for a frustrating moment. He probably could have come up with ten answers in an instant if he were sitting here on his own, but he had an audience, a dangerous audience, and he found his brain running in low gear. "Aerosmith," he said finally. "ABBA. Does it have to be the last name?"

"An A is an A," Norton replied. "This isn't Final Jeopardy."

"Then Alice Cooper." He felt absurdly proud of himself.

"Now it's your turn to name a category."

"What if I name something—exotic?" he asked. "Like paraphilias."

There was a hesitation, then Norton said, "If you can come up with three that start with A off the top of your head, I'll cheerfully cede you the victory in this round."

"So there _are_ winners and losers here?"

"Only in the most basic and informal sense," Charpentier replied. "As in, 'Oh, good one!'"

Aaron Hotchner always played to win. "States," he said. "Arkansas, Alabama, Arizona."

"States," Charpentier pronounced confidently. "Anxiety, apathy, Alaska."

_Damn. Should have specified states in the Union_. "Well played," he conceded aloud.

A modest laugh. "I've faced that one before. My turn, and the last group of A's. Mammals. Antelope, aardvark, anteater."

"Mammals," Aaron said with a little less confidence. "Armadillo, alpaca, Abyssinian."

"The cat?"

"Yeah."

"Ah," Norton said. "Well done. You choose the category—and there can be repeats—and it starts with a B."

"Let's go back to the beginning, then," Aaron said. "Pop performers. Beatles, Buggles, Garth Brooks."

"You got all the good ones. Pop performers. Byrds, Beastie Boys." A pause. "Justin Bieber."

Hotchner stared in the dark. "I can't believe that you—"

"I tutor junior high school kids. Trust me, I know my pop idols. Items in a bathroom. Brush, bathtub, bulb."

"Items in a bathroom," Aaron replied. "Um, blow dryer, bidet—"

"You have a bidet?"

"You didn't say _my_ bathroom, dammit," Aaron said, but he found that he was laughing. "Bath towels."

"And our third B category?"

"I don't mind taking the easy ones on this one: classical composers. Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach."

"Excellent choice," said Norton. "Buxtehude, Boito, and Bartok. And on to the C categories. Let's start with pop performers again. Chiffons, Carpenters—"

"You mean 'Charpentiers,' right?"

_Hey, if keeping it light humanizes me to the point he stops being a jerk, I'm all for it._

"It still simply amazes me how you knew all along how to pronounce my name," Norton said, but his tone seemed mostly one of amusement. "Chiffons, _Carpenters_, Cat Stevens."

"Um, Chicago, Sheryl Crow, Mariah Carey," Hotchner said, grateful for his recall of Haley's CD collection. "My turn? Car models. Corvette, Cobra, Civic." At the last instant he remembered that Diana Charpentier had died in a Honda Civic. He held his breath.

"Car models," Charpentier said without hesitation. "Corolla, Cutlass, Century. Now what can I do with C that's new and interesting? How about countries? Canada, Cambodia, and, ah, Croatia."

"Chile," Aaron replied. "Cameroon. Congo."

"It's wonderful to play this with an adult again," Charpentier said suddenly.

Keeping his tone as casual as possible, Hotchner said, "What do you generally do when you're with your friends?"

Norton sighed. "I have so little time to spend with them," he said. "There's always so much to do."

Everything in Aaron screamed to ask, _like what_? Instead, he said, gently, "You have a lot of responsibilities?"

_He considers himself a victim. Talk to him like a victim, not an UNSUB._

"I like to keep busy."

"And yet it sounds as if these responsibilities kind of crowd out your personal life," Aaron said as gently as he could.

"Yeah." There was a soft sigh, and Charpentier said, "Your turn, categories that start with D."

After a moment's consideration, Aaron said, "Drugs. Dramamine. Dristan. Dilaudid."

"Interesting choice."

"Not that interesting."

"Mm, somebody's D-for-defensive," Charpentier said with a chuckle. "Dextromethorphan, diazepam, and diphenhydramine."

_All generics. Is that significant? And what the hell is dextromethorphan?_

"What subjects do you tutor in?"

"Math—all the maths, actually, but mostly the high and low ends, basic arithmetic and trig. The sciences, mostly chemistry and physics. I—" He brought himself to a sudden halt, then said, "I enjoy sharing knowledge," in a tone that shouted to Hotch that he'd intended to say something else and stopped himself at the last minute.

So—does he still have sexual thoughts about children? Did he _ever_ have sexual thoughts about children? Was his conviction reversed on a technicality or was he genuinely innocent?

"I also enjoy teaching adults," Norton added, as though he'd read Aaron's mind. "And I enjoy learning. Like Chaucer's Clerk. _Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche / And gladly wolde __he lerne, and gladly teche_."

_Jesus, God_, Aaron thought as he descended into a brutal fit of the giggles, burying his head along his arm as his whole body shook. _He grabbed the wrong guy. Reid should be here, he'd fit in perfectly._

"Something's funny?"

It was like laughing in church, or at a funeral home. The harder he tried to get control of himself, the worse the laughter became. "No," he finally gasped, shoulders and ribs aching. "Well, yes. You should have kidnapped Dr. Reid—he'd be right at home in Old English."

"That's _Middle_ English," Charpentier said starchily, which only sent Hotchner into fresh gales of laughter. "It's my turn now, Authors, beginning with D. Alexandre Dumas. Isak Dinesen. Daniel Defoe."

Hotchner managed to gain control over himself. "Authors," he repeated. "Starting with D. Ah, Charles Dickens. Charles Darwin. Oh, help, help. D, starting with D. Arthur Conan Doyle. Or does that count as a C?"

"Doyle's fine," said Norton. "The last of the D categories?"

"How about book titles? _David Copperfield_—you know, I should have said Dostoevsky as my last D," Aaron added. "Ah, book titles. And I thought of it; you'd think I'd have them at the tip of my tongue. _Don Quixote_. God help me, _Dianetics_."

"That's certainly an interesting collection there," the man on the cot said. "_Deliverance. Diary of Anne Frank_. And now it's my turn to go blank. _Doctor Zhivago_, there we go. Moving on to the letter E, let's go back to pop performers. Duke Ellington. The Elegants. Jeez, how about Shirley Ellis? 'The Name Game'? _Shirley-Shirley-bo-Birley_—"

"I know it," Hotchner said, hoping to forestall any _banana-fana-fo-Firley_s. "Pop performers, starting with E. Eminem. Eagles. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer."

The lights flickered on and off several times. Hotchner would have been willing to bet that they'd go off again, but instead they steadied their glow.

_Thank you, God._

"Looks like we have power," Charpentier said.

Part of Aaron Hotchner thought, _What you mean, we, kemo sabe?_ The rest of him recognized that, for better or for worse, Norton had referred to them as a _we_, and that it was significant.

_He'll distance himself now_, he realized. _Re-establish our respective positions_.

Charpentier rose hurriedly from the cot and opened the door before the power could decide to shut down. He shut the door behind himself and moved to the window. "Let me get those off you," he said. He picked up the handcuff key from whatever he was using as a table out there and released Aaron from his shackles.

"I'll be back very soon," he said. "Within the next couple days. You have enough resources to get you through for that long, don't you?" The expression on his face seemed one of genuine concern.

Hotchner resisted, at least for the moment, the impulse to rub his chafed wrists and get the circulation back in his hands. He decided that he would be the one to re-establish their two positions. Making eye contact, he said, "Yes, Warden."

Charpentier looked ever so slightly disappointed.

_Progress._


	25. Measurable Movement

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: We're now officially just about halfway through this story! To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-Five**

**Measurable Movement**

Early in the morning of July 2nd, the 49th day of Aaron Hotchner's captivity, Bren Hawthorne was sitting in a patch of sunshine in her kitchen with the day's Jumble and Sudoku in front of her and her mobile phone within reach when a truck rumbled up their gravel driveway. Letting her reading glasses on their beaded chain drop to her bosom, she rose from the table. She thought about waking her husband, but before she could make a decision, she saw him clattering down the stairs, already dressed in jeans and workboots.

"Roberto?" Ted called out to their visitor.

"That's me," the man called back—which, due to his hearing loss, of course, Ted didn't catch the first time, so there was some shouting back and forth before Ted was convinced nobody was there to rob them or buy a horse. At least he hadn't charged off and grabbed his gun.

Bren watched her husband pocket a sweet roll and start out the back door. "What's up?" she asked.

"Joe's generator," her husband replied casually, as though she should know what he was talking about. "Guy's here to deliver and install it."

"Generator?" she echoed. "But the stable's wired!" Her husband, though, had already vanished out behind the house to meet with this Roberto person. She sighed her exasperation and walked over to the window that looked out over the vegetable gardens and the stable.

For three years the Hawthornes had cared for Joe's horse and kept the rooms over the stable for his exclusive use. In return, McAfee picked up the electrical tab for the stable, which was wired and billed separately from the main house. Did this mean that he'd be renegotiating his arrangement with them?

He's certainly acting oddly these days, Bren thought, and not for the first time. They were delighted to see him more often, but he seemed to spend a lot more of his time out walking in the woods for hours and hours. When he came into the house, he seemed distracted and weary lately. She knew that McAfee pushed himself hard, juggling a dozen responsibilities and interests. Maybe he just needed to shut down and do nothing for a few days.

_Or maybe he's depressed_.

It was hard to imagine the man they affectionately called "Sarge" having any psychological or physical conditions—he'd recently turned sixty, but looked and moved like a man ten years younger—but how else to explain that this year, for the first time since they'd met him in 2004, he'd be giving Gettysburg a miss. The anniversary of the battle was this weekend, and Bren and Ted had spoken of little else this week.

Joe McAfee was actually going to pass on Gettysburg observations! That was almost unthinkable. The man born and reared in British Columbia was a rabid amateur Civil War historian. Gettysburg, Antietam, and Appomattox were centerpieces of his year.

She made a mental note to ask Ted whether the financial arrangement with Joe had changed, and took her place again in the sunny breakfast nook with her puzzles.

She was three numbers into the Sudoku—Friday's was always fiendish—when the phone rang. She thumbed it on and said, "Carol?"

Her old sorority sister who taught constitutional law greeted her cheerfully and the two women spent a few minutes chatting before getting to the reason for Carol's call.

"That list you emailed to me?" she said. "The scans?"

Bren perked up. "Yes? Make any sense of them?"

"Well, yes," said Carol. "Once I cracked the code of the awful handwriting. I think somebody's playing amateur detective."

"How so?"

"Well, all ten of those columns represented federal prosecutions in the mid-nineties," Carol said. "Eight were from Baltimore, the other two were tried in Albany. Only other thing they all have in common is Aaron Hotchner as lead prosecutor. All but the earliest, and he was second to the lead in that one. But he's never listed except in the place where you wrote him in."

Bren's brow furrowed. "Why does that name sound familiar to me? I mean, other than as the lead in—"

"The FBI agent?" Carol prompted. "The one who was kidnapped back before classes let out? It's been all over the news, but then I know you're not that big of a TV watcher."

Bren Hawthorne had a vague memory of some coverage back in the spring about a missing federal agent, one of those interchangeable grim-faced white men in suit and tie who made up the bulk of Washington power. "He's still missing?"

"They're still looking for him," her friend said.

"You'd think he'd be dead by now, though," said Bren. "Like Jimmy Hoffa, right?"

"Well, I shouldn't say anything," said Carol. "They aren't talking about it to the media, but my baby sister's a federal judge in Virginia—she's the 'L. Emerson' in the Trafford prosecution, so she knows him, she's worked with him—and she says that the FBI knows he's alive and he's being held prisoner somewhere. Whoever has him, they forced him to write to them, I guess with a list of their demands or something. She couldn't give me any details."

_It's a puzzle_, Sarge had said. _A mystery_.

"So—whoever made that list—" she began.

"Exactly! They're working up a list of potential suspects!"

**~ o ~**

On Friday evening, the second of July, as most denizens of Quantico dispersed in hopes of an uninterrupted holiday weekend, Agents Rossi, Reid, and Anderson hunkered down in a vacant office with flyaway stacks of notes and a twelve-pack of Coke. Morgan would have been there too, but this was his weekend with Jack, and nothing would interfere with that sacred trust.

It had been a long and frustrating day, with a series of budgetary consultations—translation: lectures from Strauss—as their centerpiece.

"—quick review here," Rossi was saying. "Just a fast, fast look at everyone who's been on our radar the past few weeks, because every time I move somebody to the 'Cleared' pile, I get this spooky feeling that I've missed something, and I move them right back."

"You have to stop second-guessing yourself," Anderson said gently. "You tell us not to take it personally—"

"But this _is_ personal," Rossi barked. "The man's my best friend, and he's been through the goddamn wringer this past year. And I know that 'private prison' sounds like, oh, jail cell with bars, orange jumpsuit, three squares, but for all we know he's in a coffin under somebody's goddamn _bed _and whipped twice a week. You know what these people are like!"

He ran his fingers through his hair. "OK, category one, BAU UNSUBs convicted, but currently not in prison."

Anderson, who preferred to work with five-by-eight color-coded cards, slipped the rubber band from a short stack of purple cards. "Ready?"

Rossi clicked his pen open. "Go."

"Grabner," Anderson said. "Compassionate release, last stages of liver cancer. Verified as in his hospice since April. There's just no way on him."

"Friends and family," Rossi prompted. "Anyone among them mad enough to go after Aaron?"

"He has a wife and a grown son and they both agree he's guilty. And we're a long, long way from Beaverton, Oregon. We'd have a trail of travel data by now."

With a mournful air of finality like that of someone inscribing the name of a recently deceased relative in the family Bible, Rossi drew a line through _Grabner, J. M._

It felt as though he were snipping away a strand of some evidentiary lifeline that might bring Aaron Hotchner back.

_They're right, I'm losing all my objectivity_.

He closed that notebook with a decisive slam. "I shouldn't be making this call," he confessed. "Anderson, which bunch do you think we should be working on for final elimination?"

"The lookalikes," the agent replied without hesitation, hefting a slightly thicker stack of blue cards. "We keep coming back to them, and they're eating up a lot of our time. Plus they _look like_ him, duh. The sooner we can put the rest of them to bed, the sooner we can use our resources elsewhere."

"I can start with those," Reid said. As always, he paged through his notes. With his memory, he didn't need to do this, but he always did anyway, almost as if he wanted to fit in. "My first pick off the lookalikes list has to be Patterson. All those anger issues, and a long history of problems with authority figures."

"The biggest problem with Patterson," Rossi replied, "is that he sprained his ankle on May 9th . He was still on crutches on the 14th."

"He faked it," Reid suggested. "It's an elaborate alibi. A sprain doesn't show up on X-rays; he could go to the ER and fake the symptoms and then he has what looks like an unbreakable alibi."

"Plus he doesn't really look that much like Furface."

Reid gave a one-shoulder, negligent shrug. "Several studies of the leading facial recognition software have concluded—"

Rossi didn't think that he could handle another lecture tonight. "Let's set him aside for the moment," he said. "McAfee. Damn, but he looks like Furface. Yeah, he's ten years older, but he doesn't _look _ten years older. He looks fifty, not sixty."

Anderson paged through his own notes. "McAfee is a non-starter. I got some top people from outside his area and we trailed him around for six days, and it wasn't easy. The dude's always on the go—but he never got anywhere near any place where he might be keeping a prisoner."

"What do you mean, any _place_?" Reid asked.

Anderson flipped a page over. "He went to public places. His college. The learning center. High schools. Meetings in public venues like church basements, restaurants. One was in a small town police station." He looked up and grinned. "We actually kinda liked that one, thought a police station was about the last place you'd look to find an unofficial prisoner—but no go. They didn't even have a holding cell; they run 'em over to the county seat."

Rossi looked over his own list of the peripatetic Joe McAfee's travels between 4:22 PM, June 19th and 10:22 PM, June 25th and felt his heart sink. "I think JJ was right about this guy," he said sadly. "If he's our UNSUB, he's working with a group."

"Or a Time-Turner," Anderson said helpfully.

Reid looked up. "What's that?"

Rossi shot a warning glare at Anderson. "Don't. Just—just don't."

"I'm looking at the list of contacts for McAfee," Reid added. "Academics. Therapists. Social workers. His alibi for May 14th is an internationally-known historian, the guy who wrote—"

"A guy who also owns a blue Ford F-150 truck," Rossi said heavily. "Admittedly, it doesn't run, but—damn, I really want to pin this on him. He's too damn perfect. He can't be the guy, so…he has to be. "

Anderson and Reid regarded him silently for a moment, then Anderson said, "You've been spending way too much time with Agent Hobbes-Gutierrez."

"Maybe we need a new category," said Reid. "One for 'only if this is a group.'"

"I'm all for that," said Anderson. He fished a new pile of five-by-eight cards, buff this time, from his briefcase. Then he selected a blue rubber band and snapped it around them.

"Wait—wait," Rossi said. "You color-code _those_, too?"

"What, my gum bands?" Anderson asked innocently. "Doesn't everyone?"

Even Reid gazed distractedly at the agent for a few seconds before shaking his head slightly and saying, "OK, Urbanski. Dave, you vetted that one, right?"

Rossi gave a small private smile. It tickled him that the most junior agent in their unit had, largely on the basis of these after-hours Hotch Project meetings, finally begun to address him by his first name.

"I did, and we still come up with the beard problem. It was a van dyke, looked kinda satanic on him, frankly. No photographic proof, but anecdotal evidence from associates indicates that he didn't shave it off until Monday the 17th." He held up the photo. "No dark van dyke beard on Furface."

"Fake beard?" Reid said hopefully.

_Good God,_ Rossi realized. _He can't let anyone go, either. We both need to get off this project._

**~ o ~**

"Hands," Warden said that Friday evening.

It was as if there had never been any progress in their relationship, as if every sacrifice, every hard choice Aaron had ever made had been for nothing. So far, it had all been short, snapped questions and demands. Aaron had tried to engage the man's gaze without success.

When there was no direction specified Aaron stuck his hands out the window, one on each side of the red restraining rod. This time, Charpentier attached the cuffs himself and moved over to the door.

Three faint snicking sounds and the door opened—but there was no Warden, at least not at first. When he did enter, he trailed behind him a thin dark gray strand of cable, like that used for bicycle locks. Without so much as an acknowledgement of Hotchner's presence, he pulled the cable into the cell and attached it to one of those seemingly random hooks that protruded from the metal walls.

_Aw, shit._

In the earliest days of his captivity, Hotchner had studied those hooks, unable to keep himself from envisioning various restraint and torture devices that UNSUBs he'd studied had used to keep their victims cowed and compliant. Gradually he'd realized that Warden profiled as a man with no interest in that kind of control.

Now he wondered whether he'd misjudged the man.

Or had there been a change outside—out in the real world that Aaron found harder to picture with every passing day? Was the Team getting close to him?

Mouth dry, he said, "Permission to speak?"

"No." Charpentier satisfied himself that the cable was connected properly, then left the cell again.

Aaron bent slightly, trying to catch sight of the man outside, but before he could locate him, Charpentier was back.

"Face the wall," he commanded, "and stand completely still."

His hands fisted with tension, Hotchner obeyed. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. Slow, deep, even, quiet breaths.

_Show nothing. Feel nothing. Miss nothing_.

Warden came up behind him and reached up. Something hard but flexible encircled his neck and he stiffened.

"Completely still," Warden warned. "This is nothing to fear."

Aaron chose to continue to believe him. He stood motionless as something clicked into place behind his head, a sort of collar. Something else clicked into place on the collar.

He felt sick. _A leash! Jesus Christ, a leash? _

His hands fisted so tightly that his nails dug into his palms.

Warden was gone again, leaving the door wide open.

And then he was there at the window, gazing up at Aaron with those impenetrable blue eyes. He reached into the pocket of his slacks and withdrew the handcuff key. Without a word, he unlocked the manacles and removed them from Aaron's wrists.

"Just one moment," Warden said in a calm voice.

"Permission to—"

"No," the man said. "Hush." He moved away from the window again. Now he stood in the doorway. "Over here," he directed. "Move along the cable. Move slowly; don't tangle it up. The floor is uneven out here, much more so than it is in there."

_'Out here'?_

As though in a daze, Hotchner moved away from the window. His collar was attached to the cable by a thinner cable that extended for about six feet and ended in a ring that could slide freely along the larger of the two lines.

Heart thundering, trying desperately to disguise his anxiety, Aaron Hotchner left the metal cell for the first time in 49 days.

For the first time, he stood in the anteroom, an enormous cavern. It had to be at least ninety feet long and forty feet wide. For the first time, he saw the scissor-gate of the elevator that opened out only a few feet from the little metal box that was his cell. From out here, it looked positively minuscule, like a child's gunmetal-gray block abandoned in the middle of the room.

Beside that hateful little window with its red rod were a squat little bookshelf, a cheap plastic parson's table holding the boom box and its scattering of CD cases, and an easy chair that was upholstered in deep blue.

A few powerful lights shone from pale metal structurals about fifteen feet over his head, but beyond that was darkness that could have continued on for ten feet or thirty or forever. The open area disoriented and disconcerted him. He felt something peculiar against his face—_air currents, it's just air currents, Slick_—and he looked over at Warden, who stood silently about ten feet away from him with his hands in his pockets, just out of his reach as long as he wore the leash. When Aaron looked at him questioningly, the man nodded off to his left, Aaron's right.

He turned and saw that the heavier of the two cables ran in through an open barred door into the cage-like structure he'd glimpsed from his cell—cage-like, hell; it _was_ a cage, a huge construction with steel bars on three sides and ragged rock for its back wall. It was forty feet long and twenty feet wide, with a twenty foot barred ceiling.

He looked again at Charpentier for confirmation and the man nodded again. "I can't give you an exercise yard," he said, almost shyly, "but this may allow you a little more activity while I'm here."

The floor was really uneven once he got a few feet away from the poured concrete apron that surrounded the cell for perhaps ten feet. Beyond that, it was just bare rock, relatively horizontal but nothing like a floor.

He made his way slowly to the cage, peering into the unaccustomed dim light. Beyond the cage door, the floor was again poured concrete. He could make out a card table, a folding metal chair, a small plastic cooler, a heavy exercise mat, and, holy crap, an old-style manual treadmill.

He hesitated at the threshold, frowning at something else he saw just beyond the exercise mat. "A pickaxe?" he said aloud.

"Feel free to take out your aggressions on the back wall," Warden said with what might have been a chuckle. "Who knows? Maybe you'll mine a little anthracite."

Hotchner stared at the wall. "Northeastern Pennsylvania," he said.

"Much anthracite is mined there," Warden said approvingly. "Obviously you paid attention in school. About 40% of the national production—but it won't do to start making unwarranted assumptions.

"Stop, please," he added, his tone more authoritative, after Aaron had entered the cage. "Close the door behind you."

When it had closed, Warden pressed a remote—_the man loves his gadgets, doesn't he?_—and the thin cable fell away from the collar around Aaron's neck.

"I'll be back in a couple hours," the tidy little man said. "There's water and fruit juice in the cooler. Unfortunately, there are no bathroom facilities." Without waiting for Hotchner to say anything, he spun on his heel, engaged the play function on the boom box, and headed for the elevator.

_Every time I think I have the little bastard figured out…._

Hotch stripped off his cardigan and picked up the pickaxe. As the music—Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun," possibly the last thing in the world he expected to hear—sounded its first notes, he swung the axe hard against the stone.


	26. Holiday Fireworks

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs.

A/N 2: We're now officially halfway through this story! To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-Six**

**Holiday Fireworks**

Long before Charpentier returned to the bunker, Aaron Hotchner had worn himself out with the pickaxe and on the treadmill. Now, he prowled the perimeter of the cage, peering out into unlit areas and studying shadowy shapes. The music emanating from the boombox suggested that Norton had created a custom CD or two, mostly hits of the '70s and '80s with a little later and earlier stuff in the mix.

Considering Warden's passionate preference for classical music, Aaron had to assume that Norton had done it as a favor to him. _Is he trying to win my loyalty? Trust? Affection?_

When the elevator at last sounded, Hotch was at the far end of the cage, sipping pineapple juice and studying what seemed to be endless stacks of canvas and aluminum camping cots. Oh, and—_I can't believe I'm doing this_—quietly singing along to "I Want a New Drug."

Charpentier was pushing his little hand truck in front of him. He steered it off to the side, where it was hidden by the cell, and approached the cage without it.

Hotchner abandoned his study of the camping cots and walked over to meet Warden by the door to the cage. "Boy, do I have questions," he said.

Warden smiled slightly. "I imagined you would. Why don't you pull up a chair and I'll pull up a chair and we can deal with a couple of them."

Once they were both seated—_so strange not to be bound in any way!_—Aaron said, "You told me that this was built by white supremacists?"

"The cage, the cells, yes. The rest of it was just taking advantage of structures that were already there. The miners took advantage of the cavern. The militia took advantage of the mine."

"Wait—_cells? Plural?_"

"There's a second cell behind that one. It was never completed. It isn't wired, so there are no lights. There's a sink, and a hole for the toilet, but no commode."

Hotchner looked up around him at the cage. "And this?"

Charpentier actually laughed. "Oh, when the black helicopters came, this is where the local white boys' mighty armies were going to imprison the _federales_. They wanted to run supports across, there, and there—lay some floorboards, and make a bi-level POW camp and bring the government to its knees. They called it Andersonville II, calculated that they could warehouse three hundred POWs in it."

"And this stuff?" Aaron indicated the treadmill and exercise mat. "For the prisoners?"

Charpentier shook his head. "For the militia, I think. Training and recreation. There's stuff here I haven't even inventoried yet, and I discovered this place six years ago."

"And where were the, ah, inmates of Andersonville II supposed to relieve themselves?"

"I think that was part of the holdup on completion of it. They don't seem to have solved that issue far as I can tell."

Aaron leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "And how did you happen to come by this place?"

"Serendipity." Nothing else, just the one word. "You ready to go back in now?"

After a few seconds' thought, Hotch realized that, yeah, he was ready. The cell was warmer, brighter. It had his clock and his bed and his picture of Jack and _oh shit, I'm considering it my home?_

Norton got to his feet. He picked up the loose end of the heavier cable, which he'd wrapped around a pipe, and walked it back to the cell. He opened the door to the cell, entered it, and attached the cable again to the hook on the wall. When he returned, he said, "Pick up the connection end and fasten it to the collar. There's a catch just to the left of the clasp in back."

For a few seconds, Hotchner considered rebelling—refusing to pick up the hated leash, to participate yet again in his own captivity—but before he was even fully conscious of what he was doing, he had the leash in his left hand and was groping around to find the connection. He told himself that he was cooperating because he wanted to see Jack's picture, to read his messages again, to use the bathroom, to put first aid cream on the blisters he'd raised when he used the pickaxe.

As Warden swung the door open—and Aaron saw the one-inch gap between the top of the door and the edge of the cage, so the heavy cable could remain attached to the structural in the cage—he recognized with a stab of despair that he was becoming institutionalized. He assured himself as he walked meekly back to his cell, _no, to _the_ cell—it isn't _my _fucking cell_—that he would just be picking his battles, not flailing out wildly in battles he couldn't possibly win.

_But why didn't it occur to me for so much as a fucking minute to use the pickaxe on the door to the cage?_

"It's a good thing you didn't. It would've damaged the door so badly that even I could no longer have opened it. That lock is a delicate mechanism."

Aaron stared at him in disbelief. Was he really so easy to read? This man had him figured out so well it was truly frightening.

After another moment of hesitation, he moved out of the cage. As the door slid shut behind him, he slowed way down and turned toward Warden, who paced along calmly about a dozen feet away from him and well out of his reach. He wondered why he didn't just stop dead and refuse to return to the cell.

He told himself it was because he had to stay strong and survive.

He told himself it was because he was a fucking chickenshit.

"What if I won't go in?" he heard himself ask aloud.

_I've been alone way too long, talking to myself._

"Good question," Warden said, his tone unruffled. "You refuse to go in your cell, and I'll just leave. I'll turn off the lights and leave you out here. You can go in or not, it's up to you. Just a little heads up, though: You'll find that you can't lie down, use the commode, or reach your food and water while you're attached to the lead."

At that point, on some deep and mystic level, he pretty much lost it. "Why are you doing this to me?" he shouted, his voice echoing alarmingly throughout the cavern. "What the fuck did I ever do to you besides insult your fucking dead baby?"

"And we were doing so _well_," Warden said, still in that cool, in-control tone, almost as if he was merely amused by Aaron's dismay.

Hotchner was distracted momentarily by the totally irrelevant fact that the song currently playing on the boombox was Alison Krauss, _Oh, sinners, let's go down, let's go down, come on down…_but he shook it off.

"What do you want from me?" he roared, the hollows of the cavern turning his voice to thunder. "_Just—tell me—what—the fuck—you want!_"

"For openers," Norton Charpentier said, and his voice was like a whisper by comparison, "you could decide whether you're going into your cell or not. I have to finish the programming for the backup generator so you won't be 'Oooh, so scared all alone in the big bad dark' again."

_So he does program this stuff himself. No wonder it feels both techy and do-it-yourself._

"Seems to me," said Aaron, his own voice returning to something like normal, "that you were more stuck than I was last time." It was astonishing how much power he derived from just being able to stand up and face the man squarely, without walls or bars and without cuffs on his wrists. "After all," he added, not bothering to mask his bitterness, "it's where I live. I was already home!"

Warden's mouth twitched. "Fine. So are you going to go home now, or would you rather try to keep from accidentally hanging yourself for the next couple days? I have a tight schedule; I can't stand here and play games with you. Just—in or out, one or the other, make up your mind, or, as you might put it, 'Make up your fucking mind,' because regardless of where _you_ are, _I'll_ be on that elevator in six minutes."

Hotchner said, "Yeah. OK." Feeling that he'd finally lost everything, he entered the little metal room. He presented his hands, accepted the cuffs, snapped them on his wrists. He waited while Charpentier removed the leash and the collar, while he collected his latest assignment and brought in the new boxes of resources. By then, a male country group was assuring them that there was _power in the blood_. Aaron wondered when the CD had switched to gospel and why he hadn't noticed when it had happened.

Finally Warden left the cell and shut the door. He moved away from the window and came back with the handcuff key in his fingers.

Aaron leaned his head against the wall and looked down at his captor through the little window. "Where are you going?"

Norton blinked his surprise. "What?"

"It's a holiday weekend. Where are you going?"

"You think you've earned the privilege of asking yet more questions?"

Hotch sighed. "Just trying to make civilized conversation."

The little man snorted, then said, "A friend and I are attending a performance of _Tosca_, and on Sunday we'll go watch the fireworks."

_Fireworks. _

He hoped someone would be taking Jack to the fireworks.

"Have a good time," he said, and he had no idea why.

Norton smiled thinly. "I'll presume that you meant that sincerely and say, I plan to do so." He hesitated, the key just millimeters from the cuffs. "Just a little reminder," he said, his voice soft and sorrowful, "you _will_ pay dearly for what you said about my little boy. You'll suffer for it, trust me, you will—but it'll be on my time, and on my terms, and it won't be while I'm angry. Do you understand me, Prisoner?"

Hotchner watched the cuffs fall from his wrists. "Yeah," he said with a sigh. "I get it."

**~ o ~**

Derek Morgan lay on his back on the blanket, eyes shut, and listened to the sounds of Henry giggling and Jack explaining something about SpongeBob SquarePants to JJ and Will. Half a million other people were also gathered there on the Mall for the annual Capitol Fourth. The world was a sea of flags and Frisbees, friends and family, and the promise of fireworks to come.

It was almost enough to convince a guy to get out there and get hitched, raise himself a little crop of baby Morgans to drag down to the Mall to celebrate Independence Day.

"Morgan."

Derek opened his eyes and peered up through his sunglasses at Anderson, vivid in Hawaiian shirt and cutoffs, with his fiancee, Kristi, by his side and a cardboard tray of soft drinks in his hands.

"Hey," Derek said sleepily.

Anderson's expression, however, was feral. "You'll never guess who's just two hundred feet or so away from you," he said with a faint grin. "Joseph McAfee, Mister Furface Number Eight."

Morgan sat upright abruptly. "You're kidding." JJ and Will were also suddenly paying close attention, looking around at the crowd with a studied casual air.

Anderson squatted to distribute the sodas. "Big as life. Over that way, near the cotton candy truck—" He nodded over his left shoulder. "—he and some woman, in lawn chairs with a picnic basket and a cooler."

Morgan rose to his feet, dusting off his pants. "I _got_ to check this out," he said. As always, a few people around him stared; firearms were forbidden at the Capitol Fourth, but a federal officer was always on duty, so his Glock, like Anderson's, like JJ's, was clearly visible. "That way, you say?"

"About two hundred feet," Anderson confirmed. "When you come across the family with about a million kids, all of 'em wearing matching homemade flag-pattern outfits, McAfee's just past them. Red shirt, blue jeans, Orioles ball cap. Woman's in a white skirt and a ruffly kind of—"

"A peasant top," Kristi volunteered. "A ruffly white peasant top, embroidered in red and blue flowers. Broad-brimmed straw hat."

"Be right back," Derek said, and waded through the crowds of happy families and friends.

The man who looked eerily like the person who'd abducted Hotchner sat, as advertised, in a folding lawn chair beside a woman of late middle age. As Morgan approached him he looked up and an expression something like apprehension crossed his face, then dissolved.

Morgan knew better than to read that fear as guilt. To some white men, a muscular black man's approach would always trigger at least an instant's fear. The fact that the anxiety faded as quickly as it did might even be evidence of innocence.

Derek Morgan had spent only eighteen months of his professional life undercover, but some skills never disappeared. "Hey," he said, his voice casual, friendly. "McAfee, right? Therapy dogs guy?"

"Yes?" McAfee's gaze drifted down to the Glock and the apprehension resurfaced, along with what could be a perfectly natural curiosity.

"Derek Morgan," Derek said, thrusting his hand out at the man in the chair. "We met back in, oh, I think it was January? Altoona?"

The man who potentially was Furface gripped Morgan's hand in his own without hesitation and smiled. "I'm so sorry," he said. "I have no memory for faces—don't take it personally."

"No problem," Morgan said, and he meant it. "I'm sure you meet hundreds of people." He beamed at the woman. "Mrs. McAfee?"

"No, I'm Hannah Bell," the woman said, extending her own hand. "An old friend of Joe's. Did you come all the way down from Altoona?"

"Me?" Morgan kept his tone light, casual. "No, I'm living here now. Love it. Expensive, but there's nothing like it."

"I get down here as often as I can," said McAfee. "Mostly for Kennedy Center—"

"And to see me," Hannah prompted.

"And of course, to see you," McAfee said smoothly. "Which goes without saying. Hannah's a gifted cellist," he added to Morgan, who wondered what _that _had to do with anything.

"A pleasure," Morgan said to Ms. Bell. He considered and discarded several lines of inquiry, but she opened up a better one for him.

"I see that you're wearing a gun," she said.

He yanked his creds from his pocket and flipped them open just long enough for both people to see them, not to read them closely. "Yeah, part of the job," he said casually. "We're always on duty, even when we aren't on the clock."

"I can't imagine how much pressure that job must be," McAfee said, with what sounded like genuine sympathy. "Like being in the military. I guess this is as good a day as any other to say thanks to you for what you do."

"Well, you're very welcome," said Morgan, and the expression of courteous impatience on the faces of McAfee and his lady friend—a look that said, _OK, fine, we've met before. Do we have anything else in common, or are we done here?_—made him more confident than ever that Furface Number Eight could safely be crossed off the suspect list.

He continued along his original trajectory as far as the snack wagons, where he stood in line for almost five minutes to buy some Cracker Jacks and cotton candy. On his way back, he eased up quietly behind McAfee and Bell just long enough to overhear them arguing over the relative merits of Lang Lang—_right_, he reminded himself, _pianist, he's performing today. _Joe McAfee dismissed him as shallow and Hannah praised his verve and accessibility, for what that was worth.

He circled broadly around them and returned to JJ, Will, Anderson, Kristi, and the kids. Jack's eyes lit up at the cotton candy.

Morgan looked at his teammates, his family, and shook his head. "If he's our guy," he said, "he's just way too smooth. Short of bringing him in and seeing what we can sweat out of him, I think we have all we need."

"It may reach the point that we'll have to do just that," said JJ, "but we should exhaust some other, more credible, leads first."

"Problem is, we're running out of leads," Morgan said gloomily. "Credible or otherwise."

**~ o ~**

"Are you awake?" Charpentier called. When there was no immediate response, he thumped his hand against the metal wall. "Are you awake?"

"I am now," his prisoner croaked. "I'm awake."

Norton shoved the window aside. The lawyer, back in his magenta uniform, sat on the edge of his bed, blinking sleep out of his eyes. His feet were on the floor and one hand explored his frankly stubbly jaw. He seemed as surprised as Charpentier that he had slept through the descent of the elevator. His gaze flew to the clock, and back to the window. It was nearly 5:00 on the morning of Monday, July 5th.

"What's your name?"

"Prisoner," the lawyer mumbled.

"And mine?"

"Warden."

"Your statements."

The lawyer offered his usual robotic rendition of the statements, absent both eye contact and any kind of comprehension of their meaning, let alone sincerity.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," Norton scolded. "After all this time, I deserve better than that. Now come to the window," he commanded. "I brought you souvenirs of my weekend."

His prisoner approached the window cautiously. Norton handed the first eight-by-ten photo through the window, the one of red and yellow fireworks exploding across the sky. He'd never had much luck with iPhones and night photography, but one image had come out quite well.

The lawyer's gaze drifted across the photo, then fastened on the landmark at the center of the picture: the Washington Monument. "You were in D.C.," said, almost wonderingly.

"I was. Here's the other picture, from somewhat earlier in the day." He gave the lawyer the photograph of the grinning black man in cargo pants and the NPR tee shirt, a Glock at his waist, a Sno-cone in one hand, and Jack Hotchner's hand in the other.

The color drained from his prisoner's face. "No," he breathed. "No, leave him alone! He never did anything to you! Is this what you meant by—"

"Prisoner!" Charpentier said sharply. "Stop! I've told you, I don't hurt innocents."

Hotchner backed to the cot and sat down, the photo held loosely in his fingers. He still looked sick with dread. "What do you want from me?" he whispered, and there was nothing wrong with his eye contact now. "Anything in the world, anything that's mine to give, it's yours. Just don't—" He stopped, drew a shuddery breath, started again. "Please. He's been through so much."

"'Anything'?" Norton echoed. "Fine. Give me your absolutely undivided attention."

Prisoner set the picture aside and sat very still on the cot, his hands on his knees, his eyes riveted to Norton's.

"Listen to me," Charpentier said. "I know I told you that you'd suffer for what you said—and you will—but I don't take out my anger on innocents. Your son's in no danger from me. I wasn't stalking him; your friend there approached me on the Mall, no doubt because of some—" He grinned at the man in the cell. "—_passing_ similarity between my face and something he's viewed a hundred times from your home security system."

If the lawyer's face had been horrified before, it was comical in its astonishment now.

"So as tempting as your offer of _anything, anything in the world_, might seem at first blush, it's rooted in the fallacious notion that you'd be bargaining for your son's safety. Jack's in no danger from me—now, or ever. Even if he didn't travel with a posse of agents armed with firearms and cotton candy, I would never target him. So that's off the table. Are we clear on that?"

His prisoner nodded mutely.

"That's exactly what I told you it was: a souvenir of my weekend."

Another nod.

And, God help him, Norton Charpentier was unable to resist growling, "And this doesn't mean that I'll tolerate you whining at me every time I show up, asking what I brought you. Good night," he added quickly, and slammed the window shut before the look of utter perplexity on the lawyer's face made him burst out laughing.

As he shoved the scissor-gate open, he thought, _My God, why do I feel as if I've become Aaron Hotchner's parent?_


	27. Rites of Exchange

Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-Seven**

**Rites of Exchange**

Flowers.

Daffodils, mostly, bobbing in the breeze on a hill overlooking…oh, cool!

He could see his house from the top of this hill. His real house, the house he had grown up in. Funny, he had never noticed this hill before. He had never known he could see the house from this little park at the top of the hill.

_Totally cool! Imagine being able to see the house from here!_

With a spring in his step, he bounded down the hill, exulting in the warm spring winds, in the fluffy white clouds, in the tiny train he could see chugging along in the distance, like a toy winding around beneath a Christmas tree.

He burst through the front door of his home, waving at his father, who was, as always, lost in myriad notes from some trial or other. His dad looked up, smiled, and returned the wave. He continued on through the fragrant kitchen, past his June-Cleaver mom, shoveling Gerber's strained something-orange into his baby brother Sean's messy mouth. And she was singing. His mother was always singing. She looked up and beamed at him, blew a kiss.

"I'm going out back," he told her.

He loved their backyard. It was huge and rolling and had big leafy trees that were great to hang hammocks from and hide behind while playing soldiers with the neighborhood kids. It was like a whole different world back there and he could be anything from John Singleton Mosby to Sergeant Rock or even King Arthur. A cluster of squatty pine trees made a great fort, and his swingset was the best pirate ship in the world.

He pushed open the back door and jogged down the gently sloping hill, loving the sight of it, the smell of it, the freedom of it. The only problem he ever had here was trying to decide, _hmmm, who will I be today_?

And then he spotted it, way back in the furthest reaches of the yard, near their picnic table—a tent, a real Army tent, just like the ones in the movies. He blinked in amazement. Surely he must be imagining it—but no, he ran up to it and sure enough, he could feel the scratchy canvas against his fingertips, see the raw leather strips and scraps of rope tied to rough-hewn wooden stakes. He remembered telling his dad it'd be fun to go camping sometime in one of those, and his dad had just smiled.

That smile. He'd never quite been able to figure it out.

As he looked at it, he realized that it was actually a big ripstop nylon job, one like the tent that Jessica Brooks and her friends used when they went backpacking out in Glacier National Park. He bent down under the canopy and pushed the doorway aside.

Jack sat there, sipping a juice box and paging through a comic book. He looked up—oh, God, Haley's eyes, so smart, so solemn—and he beamed and Aaron said, "Hey, buddy…."

And Jack's smile faded from delighted to polite, and he said, "Oh. It's you."

"Well, of course, buddy," he said, still grinning. He crawled into the tent and seated himself beside his son. "Who'd you think it was going to be?"

Jack shrugged slightly and took a noisy slurp of his juice box. "My dad," he said calmly, matter-of-factly. "But you're OK, too."

A chill ran through him. "But buddy," he said, keeping his voice level and cheerful, "I'm your dad."

Jack dimpled. "No, really," he said, his voice soft and sweet, and, as always, polite. His grandmother would be so proud!

He chose his words carefully. He didn't want to alarm his son, after all. "I missed you, Jack," he confided.

The boy continued to study him solemnly. "That's nice," he said, and he peered past Aaron. "Is my dad here yet?"

"But—but buddy," Aaron stammered, "I'm your daddy."

"Nuh-uh." His eyes were so wide, and his tone was so sincere that it broke his heart. He was so, so Haley's son!

"Jack, please—" Aaron found himself pleading. "I missed you, son, I love you—"

Jack's lower lip jutted out in a pout, so like his mother when she got frustrated. "I'm not your son. Don't call me that." He turned away. "I'm really not supposed to be talking to you, you know."

Aaron's mind went numb, and suddenly he felt as though he were falling down a long, long tunnel, tumbling, dizzy, out of control.

A man's voice came from behind him. "Jason! Sorry I'm late, son."

As though in slow motion, Aaron forced himself to look toward the speaker. _Oh. My. God. It's Warden! What the hell is he doing here?_

The little man pushed open the tent flap, ducked slightly, and came in. Aaron stared at him in astonishment. He was wearing a full Civil War uniform, gun on his belt, blue Union kepi cap on his head. The tent swayed, morphed, became canvas once again.

"Daddy!" Jack cried, running to Warden and giving him a fierce hug. "I knew you'd come, I knew you would. _You_ keep your promises." The solemn stare he directed at Aaron was a stinging rebuke.

His captor embraced the little boy joyously, passionately, bending so he could swing him around in a circle. Aaron crouched on his hands and knees, unable to wipe the look of dismay off his face. "Jack!" he protested. "Jack, little buddy, please—"

That was when he saw the miniature Enforcer in the back pocket of Jack's Oshkosh b'Gosh jeans.

"Jesus Christ," he moaned, and this time he actually spoke aloud, rousing himself from his dreams. He blinked in the brilliant light of his cell …

And he was _grateful_ to be there. Grateful that Warden hadn't actually stolen his son, hadn't reformed him in his own image. He touched the metal walls reverently and let his fingers trail upward to the photo of Morgan and Jack, just—what was it? He blinked over at the clock—two days ago, Sunday afternoon. He'd used three of his growing collection of refrigerator magnets to secure that precious picture where he would see it last thing before he went to sleep and the first thing when he woke up.

When he'd managed to pry his eyes off the form of his son, he'd seen JJ and Will, with Henry looking petulant between them. Anderson's face was turned away, but he was wearing that awful shirt with the purple pineapples, a gag gift from Gideon the last year he was with the BAU. His girlfriend, too—Aaron couldn't recall her name at the moment, tall and slim with an inexhaustible store of politically incorrect jokes. And she wore a diamond on her left hand now. _So he's finally decided to take it to the next level_, he thought with a faint smile. _Good for him._

As he sat up—nearly noon, should wake up anyway—he realized that he was humming. He couldn't quite place what the song was, but he knew it was familiar. Something_-Goliath, _and something_-die-eth_.

_OK, first assignment of the day_, he told himself as he climbed out of bed and stumbled over to the john to relieve his bladder. _Recover whatever the hell that song is._

**~ o ~**

Emily Prentiss could no longer recall the name of the minor consular officer who'd dragged her to see _8 Mile_ back in '02. She just recalled his sweaty palms and his aftershave and the way he'd kept murmuring approving comments about the movie in her ear. She loathed rap and thought Eminem was a misogynistic, homophobic asshole. She'd been wondering what her privileged date with his socialite mom and white-shoe-firm dad could possibly find in the film to identify with—when suddenly the lead character's, B-Rabbit's, mother started bitching to her son about her love life.

_He won't go down on me_, she whined to her son, and when B-Rabbit whimpered and fled to the other end of the trailer to escape _too much information, too much information_, she sat frozen in her seat, identifying absolutely with Eminem's character.

Only education and a certain superficial refinement separated Ambassador Prentiss from Kim Basinger's trailer-trash rap-wannabe's-mom. Perhaps because in every other aspect of her life, she'd had to exercise the strictest discretion, Emily's mother had used her daughter as her best pal in some of the worst as well as the best ways. Even as she conferred wisdom and sophistication upon the young girl, she'd also confided her dreams and her doubts and her many so-very-discreet infidelities. By the age of thirteen, Emily had known more about her mother's cooch than any girl that age could possibly want to know.

And here she was, on a brilliant Tuesday in July, on the terrace of her mother's place in Silver Spring, trying to learn a little more about Aaron Hotchner.

Hoping she wouldn't regret this conversation until her dying day.

"Oh, my goodness," Elizabeth Stafford Prentiss exclaimed, toying with her pearls as _The Best of Peggy Lee_ played on her sound system. Ambassador Prentiss simply _loved_ Peggy Lee. "You know, I don't think I've even thought of that young man in _years_."

Emily resisted the temptation to bitch-slap her mother. "'That young man,' as you called him, is in desperate danger now, Mother," she said quietly. "We're looking into every aspect of his life, trying to learn what put him in this situation."

Her mother arched an elegant eyebrow. "Probably ambition, I would assume. Ambition is a cruel mistress, little Emmylove. It trips up more men than it ever assists." She smiled over her crystal water goblet. Her gaze wandered over the trees, toward the Capitol. "Especially there."

"Are you being deliberately obscure, Mother?"

Ambassador Prentiss gave a little cat-grin. "Jealous because you never got any of that sweet little butt, Emily?"

It was all she could do to keep her features impassive. "You're referring to my superior, and a man who's being held captive by some very bad people, Mother. Now if you have anything to contribute to the pool of knowledge, I'd really appreciate it." She made herself smile warmly. "I know you've told me in the past that—that he was a bit of a swinger." She hated that word; it instantly conjured up images of polyester suits, fertility charms, and that awful '80s hair.

And although she'd sounded confident when she talked to Morgan, beneath the tablecloth she all but crossed her fingers, hoping her mother would disabuse her of what Derek called the "Aaron the Love Machine" theory.

"Then you should be talking to, oh, what's-his-name," her mother said irritably. "Sour and balding man, the grumpy old fart with erectile issues."

"Mother, that describes at least forty percent of Metro D.C."

Elizabeth waved an airy hand. "Well, _regardless_. He owed me. He owed me, big time, _huge_, from this mess he got himself into with the CIA a few years earlier—"

Emily blinked. "Who? Hotch? With the Company?"

"No, of course not. The grumpy old fart. We'd—we had a thing, all right? Back in the day. And I—facilitated, one might say, a compromise that everyone could work with."

"I'm still confused. You and the grumpy old fart had an affair."

Ambassador Prentiss snorted. "'Affair.' Dear God, child, never an affair with that man! We _fucked_, that's all. Not my class of people at all, Emily. Talented tongue, though—"

"Mother! Can we stick to the subject?"

"But that _is_ the subject, sweetheart! The grumpy old fart, he's the one to talk to about your dear Mr. Hotchner. Because he'd gone back to his little wife and he was being good, and I didn't choose him because he was good. I mean, you get into the Bureau, by definition you're good. I chose him because he was hot. Because during his little separation he'd cut himself quite a little swath through the local peasantry, so to speak. He came highly recommended, my dear."

"The grumpy old fart."

"Don't you _listen_, Emily? The Hotchnergizer Bunny!"

_Please-God-I-didn't-hear-that-I-didn't-hear-that-I-didn't-hear-that…. _

But she was a professional. She had seen—and done—things her mother could never even imagine. She plucked a white grape from the bunch on her dessert plate and arranged her lips in an encouraging smile. "Please go on, Mother."

"Well—which part did you not understand?"

_All of it._

"Let me review, make sure I have this right," Emily said. "You had a, a 'thing' with the grumpy old fart. Then you chose Hotchner for your security detail—because he had a, a reputation as—"

"—hot," her mother concluded.

"I don't see the relationship between Aaron Hotchner and the grumpy old fart, Mother."

"Well, he recommended him as hot, discreet, and from a good family. Since I had to have security anyway, it might as well be, shall we say, 'dual-purpose'? But it turned out that he and the little Hausfrau had worked through their awkward patch and he was back on the straight and narrow, all zipped up, in both senses of the word."

In a weird way, Prentiss was relieved. "So you never actually—"

"Well of _course_ I did, dear. I _always_ get what I want."

"But you said that he and his wife—"

Ambassador Prentiss refilled her own wine glass. "So I called up my grumpy old fart friend and said, this isn't working out as promised, and he said that was all right, because he knew what your little friend's price was." She smiled icily. "And he did. He was always _very good_ at sniffing out what a person's price was. Coldest eye for the main chance I've ever seen. He should have been a pimp.

"So I got a night of joy with your—hot, but oh, so very nervous and self-conscious friend, not that it interfered overmuch with his performance—and he got to pass up that pesky seniority thing and move right into the grumpy old fart's department." Her smile was brutal. "_Your_ department, sweetheart."

For one long minute she stared at her mother. Then, she recalled a man she had seen from time to time in the Ambassador's company, and she _knew_.

_Jason Gideon, I fucking hate you._

**~ o ~**

Early on the morning of July 8th, as Norton Charpentier opened another case of bottled water, he realized that he was supposed to be at a planning committee meeting in State College at 10:00 AM. He checked his watch, stood back, rested his hip against a set of metal shelves, and sighed. _That wasn't gonna happen_.

Joseph McAfee, that most dependable of men, was about to miss a meeting. His first missed meeting ever, but probably far from the last.

This whole thing—the abduction, the imprisonment—wasn't going in any of the ways that Norton had anticipated that it—no, be honest: _fantasized_ that it would go. For the first few days, everything had gone gloriously according to plan, which was kind of amusing when you considered that he'd wound up taking the lawyer fully six weeks ahead of schedule, almost on impulse.

But now? His prisoner was either maddeningly intransigent or genuinely clueless, or both. After fifty-five days he had neither confessed his crimes and thrown himself, sobbing his penitence, on the mercy of the court, so to speak; nor had he defied Norton so openly, so brazenly, that Charpentier could justify beating him into submission.

Blood or tears, either one, would have satisfied him more than this never-ending, seething adolescent _resentment_ that Prisoner radiated like stink off a skunk. It made it so easy just to write him off as another self-absorbed yuppie lawyer, except for his damnable intelligence, his intensity. The man was as deadly as a cobra; you couldn't dismiss anything he said or did as not possibly being part of some larger and more threatening agenda. You simply could not relax your guard, not for so much as a minute.

Well, that would all change when the fresh copy of the trial transcripts arrived. He could have shown Prisoner his own copy, but his was so old, so worn, so marked by notes in half a dozen colors of ink, that it might tell the lawyer more about Norton than about the crime itself. When the avenue of denial was closed off to him, that's when Prisoner's true colors would emerge.

And he still had to deal with the question of how to punish the lawyer for his snotty remark about Jason Charpentier. He wanted the man to suffer, but the question was, A, how to keep it in proportion to the offense, and B, how to accomplish it without touching him. Because he still hated coming into direct contact with his captive unless it was unavoidable, like when he checked his grooming, or connected the collar, or—like this morning—cut the man's hair.

In the background, a clutch of pop singers covered Gershwin classics on the boombox. It was a favorite album of his—who'd have thought such a delicate sensibility could come out of, say, Sinéad O'Connor, or such tenderness out of Meatloaf?—and he hummed along with it as he wrestled the water bottles and fresh bed linens onto the hand truck, and as he steered the hand truck around the corner of the cell to the side with the window and the door.

"All cleaned up in there?" he called in through the window.

"Yeah," his prisoner assured him, then added, "Thank you for the music."

"Hands." Once the lawyer was cuffed and Norton was inside the cell, ensuring that the floor was free of his prisoner's coarse dark hairs, he said, "You liked that album?"

"Well—it's OK. It's interesting. But that one song, the one—was that Cher?"

"Cher's on there, yes. She sings 'It Ain't Necessarily So.' It's not the best cut on the album."

"That's the one," Prisoner said. "Just the other day I was trying to remember that song."

Charpentier grinned. "That sounds more like a defense attorney's favorite song than a prosecutor's."

"My mother used to sing it," the lawyer said. "When I was a kid."

Norton almost asked him whether his mother was still alive, but then he recalled that she had been one of the people who had responded to the lawyer's message to his loved ones.

He wondered whether his own mother was still alive. He'd never permitted himself to act on any curiosity as to the whereabouts of his sister, let alone Waldo and Bertha. He'd never even Googled them, how was that for self-control? He knew that his dad's—properly, his grandfather's—company was still around; whenever he traveled through Baltimore, the Interstate ran right behind the damn thing. He had to resist the urge to turn convulsively away from the sight of it.

He wondered whether "Norton Charpentier" had an empty coffin interred in the family plot. Wondered whether his mother—if she was still around—ever lit a candle in memory of her son around his birthday, or maybe the anniversary of his disappearance in Alaska. Wondered whether she still habitually squirreled safety pins and rubber bands in the pockets of her house dresses. _She would be, what, seventy-six, right? And he's seventy-nine. If they're still alive, they've probably retired to Boca Raton or Phoenix or something…._

"Uh, I'm sorry?" he said.

Prisoner had been talking to him, and here he'd been, a million miles away!

"I said," the man standing beside the wall repeated, his tone quiet, respectful, "that I would really like a chance to send another letter, if I may."

Norton looked him up and down. He should just refuse, he thought, and let that be the man's punishment for cursing Norton's dead son. After a few seconds of thought, though, he said, "And what would you be prepared to trade for that privilege?"

Prisoner looked right back at him, cold for cold, calculating for calculating. "Name it," he replied. "Name your price."

**~ o ~**

Fortunately, when Spencer Reid awakened from a vivid erotic dream that involved him taking Jessica Brooks from behind in her laundry room while he wore nothing but socks and loafers and she seemed to be wearing something scarlet and kinky, he was lying face down. This was a good thing, because he was lying on Jessica Brooks's couch, and not three feet away was Jack Hotchner, sitting on the floor with the remote and a big bowl of popcorn, still watching his _Incredibles_ DVD.

Not to mention the aforementioned Ms. Brooks, modestly and conventionally clad, popping in and out of the room as she did her Friday night after-dinner tidying-up.

He blinked furiously—_how can you have a dream that detailed when you were asleep less than ten minutes?_—and shifted positions with care.

"Spencer?" Jack said. _The Incredibles_ were frozen on the TV screen.

"Mmf?"

"Why did Daddy go?"

Reid exchanged hurried glances with Jess. Jack's therapist had assured them all along that when Jack was ready to talk about the baffling disappearance of his remaining parent, he would let them know, and until then they were not to try to shovel information into him that he wasn't ready to process.

"You mean, why did the bad person take him away?" Jessica asked.

Jack shook his head. "Why did Daddy go with the bad guy? Why didn't he just say, 'No, I'm gonna stay'?" And it was Spencer he was looking at, not his aunt. Spencer, the man who knew everything.

Any residual physiological effects from his dream were gone now. He rolled to his side. "He probably tried," Reid told the little boy. "We know that he was arguing with the bad person, and—"

Jess was shaking her head frantically, trying to make sure he didn't mention the surveillance footage. Dr. Emory had made it clear that actually watching images of his father's abduction would probably traumatize the child even more, at least at this juncture.

_Well, I didn't say how we know he was arguing. And I don't hear him asking, either._

"He wanted to stay," Reid told the child gently. "He loves you so much, we know that he tried so hard to stay! But the bad man hurt him, and—"

Jack nodded solemnly. "He hit him with a knife," he said.

Reid closed his eyes in consternation. _No, that was another bad man. You poor kid, the world you know is any child's worst nightmare, a world full of men who really do want to do terrible things to your family._

"No, that was Mr. Foyet," Jessica said, and there was something about the formality and the courtesy of the title _Mister_ that Reid thought was just completely wrong.

_Not to mention having more than one real-life monster in your life._

"Mr. Foyet is dead," Jack said, his whole affect chillingly calm. "He died and went to be with Mommy."

"Absolutely not!" said Jessica, a look of horror on her face. "Mr. Foyet isn't with your mommy. He went to where the bad people go! Your mommy went to where the good people go!"

Reid settled back on the couch, grateful that the conversation had once again floated into the field of metaphysics and concepts of afterlife, which were emphatically Jess's department and not his.

But the subject had finally come up.

The Team would need to know.


	28. Seven Deadlies

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-Eight**

**Seven Deadlies**

Aaron Hotchner, sitting on his bunk with his feet drawn up, stared through the window at Warden. "That's all?" he said, trying to keep the surprise off his face and out of his voice—and wondering what the catch was.

"That's it," said Charpentier. "For the remainder of this month, you will give me eye contact and recite your statements in a manner that suggests to me that you understand and believe in what you are saying—whether you do or not is immaterial, at least at the moment. That's part one. We're operating on the AA 'Fake It 'Til You Make It' philosophy; we'll see if it makes any difference. Part two is to answer a series of questions for me about your general morality."

"And for that—I get to send another letter?"

His captor's face remained impassive. "That's the deal."

Hotchner glanced at the clock. It was Saturday afternoon, July 10th, his fifty-seventh day of captivity. Twenty-one days, and Warden showed up on average every three days, so—faking sincerity seven times. And answering some questions about morality.

That was eminently doable, but a good negotiator never gave it away that easily. "Will I still get exercise privileges?"

Warden sighed. "I suppose you'll want the sun, the moon, and the stars, too?"

"I'm just—just trying to make sure I understand your terms completely."

"Chapter Three," Warden said with a chilly laugh. "Really, Prisoner—do you still think you're dealing with an amateur here?"

_Chapter Three? What the_—he caught his breath in dismay. The third chapter of the book on negotiation he'd coauthored with Jason Gideon and Mac Tingley. _Just trying to make sure I understand your terms completely_ was in fact a recommended phrase in this very kind of situation.

"No, sir," he replied, as meekly as he could. "You've been demonstrating your expertise for a couple months now." He tried to meet the man's eyes. "Warden, when I try to follow the right way to do things, that's a gesture of respect for your—your competence. I'm not trying to con you. You're in control. You've been in control all along."

"Ah," said Warden with another laugh, even chillier. "The lose-lose proposition, forcing your opponent either to agree with you, in which case he loses, or to point out examples of when he was not in control, in which case he also loses. Chapter Nine?"

"Eight," Aaron said. There was no sense in arguing about it. "But you have to understand, sir, it's not that I'm sitting here and trying to follow the strategies in the book. It's that I've been living by them, that they work, that's why they tapped me to write those sections. I'm not trying to game you, Warden."

Charpentier peered through the window at him with those solemn blue eyes for a long, long moment, then he said, "I imagine you're not, Prisoner. At least, I imagine you're not _trying _to game me. You've been gaming so long that I don't think you know how _not _to game people anymore. It's all a big transaction to you, isn't it?"

_OK, I'll hand you a little victory, Warden_. "Sometimes," he confessed. "It becomes a habit. It isn't something I do deliberately."

_There. Do you feel superior now? Do you feel that you've accomplished something? _

"For the record," said Charpentier, "so long as you continue to cooperate in every way, there's no reason for you to lose your exercise privileges. So what's the word, Prisoner?"

Still trying not to seem too eager, Aaron allowed himself a small nod. "Then I'll agree to that," he said. "That's a deal I can live with."

"Good," said Warden. "And now we can deal with your disrespect for my late son."

_Well_, Aaron thought, even as he tensed up again, recalling Warden's enthusiasm with the Enforcer in the earliest days of his captivity. _At least we're getting it over with._

"Yes, sir," he said quietly, resisting the impulse to add anything else.

After a few uncomfortable moments of silence, Warden went on. "Because in the end everything has to work toward your rehabilitation, I've decided that it would be unwise to punish you physically for your arrogance and cruelty."

There was a pause, and Hotchner knew that his captor was waiting for him to react in one way or another. Instead, he stayed very still, barely breathing, not even shifting his gaze from that one little web of wrinkles at the corner of Warden's right eye.

_You think you can wait, dickwad? I can wait longer. You have other places to be. All I have is time._

"Since a humbled prisoner is one who is on the road to penitence," Charpentier said finally, "this evening, when you give me your statements, you will give them on your knees."

Hotchner gave that a moment's consideration. In many ways it was a meaningless gesture, a few seconds' discomfort to satisfy a troublesome antagonist. On the other hand, Charpentier seemed to be coming from a conservative Roman Catholic background. To Warden, such a physical posture no doubt symbolized abject and utter surrender. Did Aaron really want to go along with that kind of perception?

"Fine," he said at last. "That's fair. You want it now?" Was Norton eyeing him oddly?

"If you're ready," Charpentier said. Yes, his voice was tentative, suspicious.

"I am." He rose from the cot and got down on his knees on the cold metal. _Wonder what I'd have to trade to get a fucking throw rug around here. _He gazed up at his captor—_and since __he's half a foot shorter than I am, this is power for him that way, too_—and drew a deep breath, wondering whether he was about to make things better, or much, much worse.

Monitoring every aspect of his posture and his tone so it reflected solemnity and respect, he said, "Forgive me, Warden, for I have sinned." He thought he probably had the wording from the confessional right. When Norton's features darkened, he continued, "What I said about your son was completely out of line. I should have known better, and I'm genuinely asking your forgiveness."

"Ideally," Warden said at last, "it starts out, 'Bless me,' not, 'forgive me,' but of course I'm not a priest. And while I believe you're being sarcastic, I can't prove it, so we'll let it pass. Now, let's hear those statements."

_I'll take my victories where I can find them._

"Warden," he recited, putting all the sincerity at his command into the words, and damn it, he might not be much of an actor, but he was a lawyer and in some ways it was the same skill, wasn't it? "I wish to acknowledge my part in your wrongful incarceration. I—" _Crap, what comes next? "_—I betrayed my oath to preserve and protect the, uh, Constitution of the United States. I participated in a conspiracy to convict an innocent man. I'm ashamed of and sorry for my malfeasance. I beg permission to do what I can to make restitution for the wrongs I've done to you."

_One paragraph done._

Another steadying breath.

"I understand that the length and severity of my sentence are contingent upon my penitence and good behavior. I thank you for your continuing effort to make my time served as humane and dignified as is consistent with my offenses against you and the justice system."

_There. Got through the whole thing with a straight face_.

He let his eyes drop, bowed his head low. Did the whole penitential thing.

Held his breath.

Something landed on the floor beside him—his exercise collar. Finally confident enough to exhale, he picked it up and snapped it around his neck.

"Hands," Warden said.

_"_Yes, sir_,_" Aaron said with a satisfied sigh, rising to his feet. "Thank you, Warden."

~ o ~

Three hours later, he was once again standing handcuffed to the barred window.

There was a horizontal bar in the exercise cage, one that he could just barely reach if he leaped for it, and he'd decided to measure his fitness by counting the number of pullups he could perform. On July 2nd, it had been one—which, as miserable as it might seem, was at least an easily bested baseline. Today, eight days and two exercise sessions later, he had managed six, so he was sore, but pretty pleased with himself.

Warden entered the cell and walked slowly from the door to the cot. The straps squeaked as he seated himself. "We're agreed that I can ask you anything?" he asked again.

_I thought this was supposed to be about morality._

"Sure," he replied listlessly. In the end, everything was about morality, anyway.

_There's nothing I won't do to reach out to Jack_. _To hear from him._

Warden's weight shifted. "And you'll commit to answering with complete honesty."

"I agree," Aaron said. "I'll do it."

"Let's start with basics. What are the seven deadly sins?"

_Jesus. Definitely a Catholic education. Despite what he said earlier today about not being a priest, he probably seriously considered becoming one, possibly even attended seminary for a time._

Some of those late night chats with Rossi are about to pay off._ When I get out of here, Dave, I'll buy you a case of whatever single-malt you want, just for saving my bacon here._

"Pride," he answered. "Anger. Greed, lust, sloth." _Come on, come on__—__two more!_ "Envy," he added, with less confidence. "Um, and I think—gluttony?"

A chuckle. "Are you asking, or telling?"

Hotchner was unamused. "Telling," he replied. "The last is gluttony."

"Not bad," Warden said. "Menninger argued that, properly, cruelty and dishonesty should be on that list, too. Interesting that Mother Church didn't see things that way, isn't it?"

_Mother Church. Yup, Catholic upbringing. I swear to God, Norton Charpentier studied for the priesthood. But—astrology? And Menninger. So_—d_efinitely a seeker after higher truths, spiritual answers. _

"Sticking for the moment just to the statutory Seven," Warden continued serenely, "look deep within yourself. Which of them would you say that you've violated the most?"

Hotchner was ready for that one. "By 'the most,' do you mean the most often, or the most egregiously?"

There was a pause. Good? Bad? Then with a barely suppressed chuckle, Norton said, "That depends on which answer I'll find more interesting and enlightening."

"So—this is for purposes of enlightenment, rather than amusement?"

"I won't deny that there's a certain entertainment value involved, too, Prisoner. And I'm waiting for your answer—an answer you promised me would be entirely honest."

The easy answer was lust. He was an unattached male; thoughts about sex were rarely far below the surface of his consciousness. Hell, they'd been there when he was attached, too. It came with the territory, the hormones, the whole Type-A, Alpha Male thing.

The easy answer, but not the truthful one.

"Pride," he admitted quietly.

"_That isn't your conscience talking," Dave had told him one frosty night in Boston, just a few feet from a bus full of corpses. "It's your ego."_

"Pride," Warden repeated. "Interesting choice of sins. Most men would say lust."

Aaron sighed. "I thought about that. Lust is up there, all right, but—it's not what gets me into trouble. I can control my urges. It's my ego that trips me up. I've been called out on it a few times, too."

"Where does wrath fall on your list of sins?"

"Wrath? Oh, anger." Hotchner considered that. "I get impatient sometimes, and I know that I have high standards. But I don't think I get angry much. Not like—"

_Better not to go there._

"Not like whom?" Charpentier said, his voice gently prompting, and Hotch noticed that he said "whom," and not "what." He wondered if this was what it felt like to visit one of those Roman Catholic confessionals. If so, he was grateful he'd been reared Presbyterian.

"It doesn't matter," he said, hoping Warden would go on to some other topic.

No such luck. Warden was on him in a heartbeat. "You agreed to answer my questions, and to do so with complete honesty. Unless you've changed your mind about contacting your family again…that is what you wanted, wasn't it, Prisoner?"

Hotch avoided his eyes. "Yes, sir, that's what I want."

"Then answer my question: To whom were you referring earlier?"

Oh, what was the use of holding back? It couldn't hurt anything at this point, and as pointless as this conversation was, at least it was human contact and it might even provide another chance to learn more about the man who was holding him captive—a man who had his own daddy issues, Aaron was sure.

"My father," he said softly.

"Mmm," Norton rumbled, contemplation pitching his voice somewhat lower than Aaron was used to hearing. "You displeased your father? You were…a disappointment?"

"I—I guess I was."

"And would you care to elaborate on that? How did you let your old man down?"

Hotchner resisted the urge to squirm; they were entering territory that still, at age forty-four, made him acutely uncomfortable to contemplate.

"I don't know," he began feebly. "I tried to stay out of trouble, but—I guess I wasn't very good at it."

Warden leaned forward slightly on the cot. "Trouble…hmm. And what kind of trouble did you get into as a privileged young man, as a Burning Hills Country Day School boy? Smoking a joint in the boys' room? Feeling up a cheerleader? Taking Daddy's Jag on a joyride?"

"No," Hotch said, ignoring his captor's bitter sarcasm. "I think I could've dealt just fine with any of that." Meaning: _I think _he_ could've dealt just fine with that. With most of that._

"Then what?"

Hotch lifted his head and looked over his shoulder straight at Warden. "I was elected class president my freshman year."

The little man's eyebrows shot upward. "And that disappointed your father?"

"Yeah. It meant I was one of the 'popular' kids. He despised them more than anything."

Warden studied him with an unnerving intensity, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his chin resting on his clasped hands. "Your father was a self-made man," he observed. "The kind who never got handed any breaks."

Hotchner pictured the man, loud, passionate, brilliant, bull-necked, barrel-chested, a take-no-prisoners scrapper from the wrong side of the tracks. He loathed the Establishment and never quite forgave his wife for her upper-crust heritage.

And for the first time in his life, he wondered, _Then why in the hell did he marry her? _This avenue of thought so surprised him that for a few seconds he forgot to respond to Warden. "That's—that's a reasonable assumption," he conceded finally.

_If you weren't a delusional ex-con with a grudge, what a therapist or a profiler you would make…._

_On the other hand, you have my yearbook. You know way too much about me already. How hard would it be for you to get details on my father?_

Warden continued to study him. "What else did you do that got you into trouble?"

Hotch swallowed. Clouds had passed over Warden's features, but he was so damn hard to read. "Well, I…I won a swim meet once. We were tied going into the final event. I won the solo freestyle, put us over the top."

Warden shook his head slightly. "And _that_ pissed off the old man?"

"He couldn't swim. Couldn't do anything athletic." Hotch gave a wan smile. "Had to miss three days of school to let the welts on my ass go down. Teammates would've seen 'em in the shower."

"Mm." Again that weird, low-pitched sound from Charpentier. "And you really believe they didn't already know?"

Actually, he hadn't ever tried to think that one through either, once his father was gone. It was as though once he was out of the picture he could just drop everything and start fresh. "I hoped at the time that they didn't," he admitted. "They probably did, though."

"We seem to have pissed off our fathers in diametrically opposite ways," Norton observed with what might have been a chuckle. "My old man would have turned handsprings if I'd shown even the slightest athletic ability."

As though realizing that he'd been lulled into a sense of equality, Charpentier cleared his throat a couple of times. "But let's get back to lust," he said. "I've always wondered: Were you scoring with both the blonde lawyer, Allgood, and the redhead in the Clerk's office?"

_God, Cynthia_, Aaron thought, recalling a few memorable moments in the law library, but then he stopped to think about timelines. Sorely as he'd been tempted on a couple of occasions, he hadn't strayed at all while he was working _Wasserman, Sinclair_. It wasn't until later, when Haley flipped out and left for—God, it had been almost fifteen long, miserable months, with both his mother and hers on him like stink on shit constantly, because somehow it was _his_ fault, it was always the _guy's_ fault, and he'd felt like his dad had been right all along, it was an exercise in futility trying to please the women in his life—_Focus, Hotchner!_

"Oh, during your case?" he asked, aiming for the most casual, the most innocent of tones, setting up a technically honest answer. "Neither of them." And, after all, he hadn't tapped the redhead in the Clerk's office, the one with the big blue eyes and the spectacular rack, at all. She'd been pretty much Marty Desmond's private honey right up until she upped and moved to—Japan? India?—someplace for spiritual enlightenment, could be there still for all he knew.

He refused to turn around, but he was pretty sure from the silence behind him that he hadn't managed to mislead Warden. Maybe on another day, in another place, he could have let it lie, but he was lonely and frustrated and on the ragged edge of giving up on ever being found by the Team, and his emotions lay far closer to the surface than they ever had in his outside life.

"What the fuck did I ever do to you?" he blurted desperately. "I was the fucking low man on the totem pole back then, hell, Marty Desmond called me a fucking coffee boy in an Hermès tie. We only spoke twice, and I asked you, what—three questions on the stand? Four?"

When Warden replied, his tone was calm, amused. "You seem to have an excellent memory for our history together when it suits you."

"Jesus!" he roared. "I'd better, by now. I've reviewed every second of it, over and over, and I can't find anything I ever said or did that you could possibly interpret as conspiracy to convict an innocent man. Never mind that I'd never do anything like that—I can't even think of anything you could _misconstrue_ as conspiracy. _Nothing_!"

Warden was beside him then, leaning against the wall immediately to his left, as close as he'd ever been to Aaron in almost two months of captivity. Hotchner's sweater moved and shifted. He felt Charpentier's hand slip under the shirt of his scrubs and the contacts of the Enforcer sliding up along the bare skin of his spine.

"Nothing?" Warden snarled.

He gripped the vertical bar with both hands, bracing himself for the shock to come, resisting the temptation to weep, to beg. "I can't give you something I don't have," he gasped through gritted teeth. "I can't even think of anything rational I could _make up_ to satisfy you. It doesn't matter what you do to me, I can't offer you something that isn't there."

As suddenly as it had been applied, the Enforcer was withdrawn. "We're done here," Warden said abruptly, and Aaron thought for an instant that he would faint from sheer relief.

"Yes, Warden," he mumbled as he slowly pried his fingers from around the bar. "Thank you."

"Before I deliver your resources, I''ll ask you another series of questions," Charpentier said. "You can sit on your bed to answer them. Your friends and family have been asking questions and I'll be asking you how you want those questions answered."

The shock that tore through him, although painless, was as devastating as any jolt from Warden's Enforcer would have been.

_They're asking questions? They're in communication with Warden? _The tears he'd fought back when he was threatened now rolled unchecked down his cheeks, and he choked back a sob of gratitude. _I'm not alone_. _The Team's on this._

"Are there—other messages?" he asked.

"Only questions, so far," Warden replied. "They just started to arrive. Considering how little genuine cooperation you're giving me, the only reason I'm inclined to allow you a message at all is out of kindness toward the people you left behind. It's certainly nothing you've earned."

Aaron rested his head against the metal wall and tried to wipe his eyes on the sleeve of his sweater. "Thank you," he whispered. "I'll do better. I promise, I'll do better."

_Christ. That's exactly what I used to say to my dad._


	29. Miss Nothing, Nothing at All

A/N: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Twenty-Nine **

**Miss Nothing, Nothing at All**

It was the last voice he expected to hear at two o'clock on a Sunday morning.

"Agent Morgan," Erin Strauss said, and from the tension that just those two words reflected in her voice, everything from terrorist attacks to Hotchner's body being found flew through his imagination.

"Ma'am?" he croaked. He sat up in bed and cleared the sleepiness from his throat.

"There's been another," Strauss informed him crisply. "Claymore Guffey, you recall him?"

"Who? Another what?" He seemed to recall the name from somewhere, probably from some old investigation. He snapped the bedside lamp on as his brain rolled into gear.

"Guffey, Oklahoma City field office?" Strauss said.

Yeah, yeah. He had him now. Skinny strawberry blond in his late thirties, full beard. Beards were unusual in the Bureau, unless, like Rossi, you had a rep to back them up. To justify the chin fur. Guffey was still relatively new to the FBI. Intense. Ambitious. "What about him?"

"He never showed up to pick up his kids last night," Strauss told him. "He's gone, his phone and battery separated on the back porch, car's in the drive, groceries still in the sack in the kitchen, blood and signs of a struggle. Mail in the mailbox and the Saturday paper's on the lawn, so he's been gone since Friday, just like Aaron. And he's a former federal prosecutor, just like Aaron."

Morgan let that sink in for a few seconds. "Surveillance footage?"

"His system was down, they aren't sure why yet. Nearby cameras picked up an unfamiliar white Dodge Ram cruising the neighborhood between five and seven on Friday afternoon."

"Anything in common? What does Garcia have on this?"

"Garcia's home in bed, Agent Morgan. I called you first."

Fifty-eight days, and some little corners of the Unit Chief (Acting) job still tended to sneak up on him. "I'll get on that," he told Strauss. "I don't see how we can afford not to fly out there and take a look for ourselves."

"If this man—or these men—intended from the beginning to target Bureau personnel, and it wasn't specific to Aaron, we need to get on top of it immediately," said Strauss. "I'm heading in to the office myself, and I'll see to it that anything you need is available."

"Thank you, ma'am."

He rang off and thumbed Garcia's number. "Hey, Baby Girl," he said, trying to keep his tone light to the drowsy tech analyst, "I need you in the office, now. I'll heads-up the rest of the Team. We're heading out to Oklahoma City within the next few hours."

"Oklahoma City?" Garcia mumbled. "Another explosion?"

_Right. The Murrah Building bombing in '94. _

"No, sweetheart. Looks like Mister 'I-Run-a-Private-Prison' has snatched another agent."

There was a brief silence, then Garcia's voice came back, strong and alert. "Sir, I'll be on the road in four minutes. Do you want me to call the rest of the Team?"

"Baby Girl, you just get yourself to Quantico safe and sound, and I'll round up the rest of the troops."

"Over and out," she said, and hung up.

Still shaking his head in disbelief at this turn of events, he speed-dialed David Rossi.

**~ o ~**

Before the sun rose, they were gathered on the westward-bound jet, sucking down caffeine and reviewing the facts as they continued to come in. They compulsively compared each item in the life of the missing Oklahoma agent to facts in the life of Aaron Hotchner. Emily Prentiss wasn't sure whether this new abduction made her feel more hopeful, or more depressed.

Claymore Steven ("Guff") Guffey was thirty-nine, five years younger than Hotch. Like Hotch, he was known universally by the first syllable of his last name. He was divorced from his wife, Jarmila, whom the world called "Sunny." They shared custody of their two children, Claymore, Jr., known as CJ, and Susan. During the summer months, Guff had them from Saturday night through Tuesday night; he'd been due to pick the kids up at seven Saturday evening, at the ice rink where CJ had hockey practice and Susan took figure skating lessons.

Guff had served as a federal prosecutor for eleven years—more than twice as long as Hotch—and had been in the Bureau only since 2007. He'd finished sixth in a class of 49 at Quantico; Oklahoma City was his first and only posting so far.

By contrast, after just under five years as a prosecutor, Hotch had finished first in a class of 48 at Quantico. He'd been assigned plum postings in the DC area, and after less than a year as an agent, had been transferred to what was then called the Behavioral Sciences Unit—the forerunner of the BAU. Then came a lateral two-year transfer to Seattle as SAC for command seasoning. He'd returned to the BAU as Unit Chief when Gideon collapsed following the Boston explosion that killed six of his agents.

Picking her words carefully, Emily flagged Morgan's attention. "Do we have any information," she said, aiming for an air of curiosity, "on how Hotch managed to get around the five-years-of-experience prerequisite for the BAU?"

_There. It was out there._

Morgan made a casual gesture with his coffee cup. "I've always presumed it was his general competence level," he said. "I mean, look at him. Plus he had both Jason Gideon and Dave as mentors." He looked at Rossi. "You knew him before he joined the Bureau, right?"

Rossi studied the surface of his coffee. "Aaron attended several of my seminars on profiling while he was still a prosecutor," he replied. "There was no doubt from the get-go that he was a pretty gifted guy, the kind who could be a hell of an asset to the Bureau, to the Unit."

_He hasn't answered the question_, Emily thought. She glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed, but they all seemed to be focused on the Guffey abduction.

"What about Guffey's divorce?" she said. "We all know what this job does to marriages, but we need to look at everything, and both Guff and Hotch were single dads expecting to spend time with their kids."

On the wall screen, Penelope Garcia took up the narrative. She'd managed to get her face made up and her hair brushed out and arranged, but she still wore the oversized pink T-shirt she'd thrown on in her rush to get to Quantico at 2:00 AM.

"They met in Boston in '95, when Guffey was in law school," she reported. "He was heavily into paper-and-dice RPGs; she worked at the game store he frequented in Harvard Square. Her dad was on the faculty at Boston U. They married there in '97. CJ was born in '99, Susan in '01."

"Hold up," said Morgan. "Boston again. Boston was Hotch's first profiling assignment—" he looked around at them with a sour expression "—and we all know how that one came out. The goddamn Reaper. And the warehouse bomb, in '04, that was where Gideon lost it, and that was also in Boston. And then in '08, we were back to Boston with the Reaper."

"Shaunessy made the deal with Foyet in March of 1998," Garcia reminded them. "And Claymore Guffey was a federal prosecutor in Boston during that period. So Hotch and this guy were in Boston at the same time, might even have been working out of the same office."

For a while following the discovery of the potential Boston connection, that was all the Team looked at. It was thin, but it was the closest thing they had to a real lead yet.

It wasn't until they were almost to Oklahoma City that Prentiss managed to sit down next to David Rossi for a few quiet minutes.

"Tell me about Hotch's marriage," she asked him quietly. "Is it true that he and Haley had a long history of marital problems, from even before the Bureau?"

Rossi looked at her curiously. "Sure, didn't you know that?"

"Nope, I thought that up until their divorce, things had gone pretty smoothly for them."

He chuckled. "Emily, nobody who gets married right out of high school is in for a smooth ride, and Haley and Hotch were no exception."

"They really did get married right out of high school? Literally?"

"Well, _she_ was straight out of high school. She was a year or two behind him. Aaron was already in college when they got married. And she had to get her own education in bits and pieces because when they married, his mom yanked the financial rug out from under him. She'd continue to pay for his schooling, she'd even cover dorm living, but she wasn't about to support him and a wife, too.

"So both of them had to juggle work and school, and that put a strain on the whole 'happily ever after' thing, as least as far as Haley saw it. So they deferred kids, they deferred a bunch of stuff that they'd talked about, that they'd planned. And she started thinking, well, when he's out of college—and then, well, OK, when he's out of law school—and then, well, when he's practicing law. And eventually the penny dropped, this is never gonna be Beaver Cleaver World, he's always gonna be chasing something else, and she kinda freaked."

Emily resisted the urge to pick at her nails. "I heard they were separated for a while."

Rossi chuckled. "Oh, you did, did you? Yeah, she left him in, ah, believe it was '95, '96. They were apart for about a year, as I recall, but I don't think that flame was ever out for so much as a minute.

"Give 'em credit, they lasted almost ten years, then they put it back together and gave the marriage, what, seven, eight more years before she got sick of playing the other woman to the BAU." He leaned toward her, all intensity. "I don't think Haley ever actually loved Marcus, I think it was just the _idea_ of Marcus, and I know for a fact that Aaron never loved anyone but Haley. You saw them together, Emily. They had _chemistry_. I mean—" He opened his palm, then closed his fingers tightly. "—she had his brains, his heart, and his balls _right there_, and that seemed to be just fine with him—as long as the Bureau didn't need them. Problem was, the Bureau _did_."

"Who was Marcus?"

Rossi made a dismissive gesture. "He gave her attention when Aaron was away, he sang a song that she kinda wanted to hear. He was gonna take her away from all this and give her glamor and attention and all that stuff she'd thought she wanted, but in the end she couldn't reconcile Marcus and a stable life for Jack, and Jack was always her first priority. I honestly believe that if things had—worked out differently—they'd be back together by now."

Before she could maneuver the conversation around to what kind of sexual exploits Hotch had—or hadn't—been up to during the separation, there was a live linkup with the OKC SAC, and the opportunity to raise the subject was gone, at least for the moment.

**~ o ~**

The week in Oklahoma City ground on in a grim echo of that first week in May, when Aaron Hotchner had first vanished—and with about as much progress.

While technicians continued to analyze the crime scene, while Guffey's pale and exhausted ex-wife spent hour upon hour looking at mug shots—including those of every one of Rossi's original "potential Furfaces"—while Guffey's terrified children went into counseling to deal with their fears, their confusion, and their nightmares, the members of the BAU kept moving the same facts around like puzzle pieces that _look__ed _as though they should fit.

The similarities: Boston. The DoJ. The Bureau. Divorce. Custody. Friday night. An unfamiliar pickup truck sighted in the neighborhood. Even camping equipment, since Guff had stored a Coleman stove and lantern on his screened-in back porch, the site of the abduction. And, at last, the expected USPS envelope stuffed with crumpled newspapers, returning the agent's creds, his billfold, and his watch. It had shown up on Thursday morning, mailed on Monday from St. Louis (500 miles away). Hotch's belongings had shown up on Wednesday, but had also been mailed on Monday, from Harrisburg (120 miles away).

The differences: Hotch had been overcome using a cattle prod and drugs; while no video evidence of Guff's abduction had been found, a window and an antique piano bench had been broken in the struggle, and spatterings of Guff's blood had been found in four places on the carpet and the pad of the porch swing.

In terms of victimology: Hotch was hyper-competent; Guff was, well, a better talker than performer. Hotch obsessively lived within his means and saved for Jack's future; Guff was overextended to the point of selling family properties to meet his immediate obligations. Aaron Hotchner was a widower who had maintained, until the Reaper had destroyed his life, courteous and civil ties to his ex-wife and her family; Claymore Guffey's separation and divorce had been a nightmare of acrimony, of charges and counter-charges and a poisonous custody battle.

By Friday night, July 16th, the one-week anniversary of Guffey's disappearance and the nine-week anniversary of Hotchner's, the Team felt so thoroughly dispirited that they made a conscious decision to have a big dinner in the hotel's best restaurant, just to clear their heads and renew their sense of camaraderie.

Morgan had his last forkful of chocolate-bourbon pie to his lips when Garcia's ringtone sounded on his cell. He regretfully set down the utensil. "'Sup, Baby Girl?" he said, but his smile faded as he heard her strained tones.

"I'm home," she said. "I'm home and there's another…letter from Hotch." She bit her lip. "And it isn't just a letter."

Morgan immediately thought of a finger or toe as an enclosure. "Get Trace there, on the double," he commanded. He sensed everyone else at the table suddenly silent, focused on him.

"Listen, Morgan, this is totally NSFW, well, not so much _not safe for work_ as not safe for anyone who _isn't_ work-type people. You're gonna want some privacy for this one."

"We're in a restaurant, but it's only us, Baby Girl," he said.

"Call me back when you're someplace private," Garcia said. "Seriously."

_Oh, this is sooo not good. _When Garcia said to take something seriously, then things were, indeed, _serious_. "Okay, be back with you in five," he said, and hung up.

Four anxious faces stared at him from around the table. "Garcia just got another letter from Hotch. Says there's something else with it, too—something too private to discuss here." He pushed back his chair and stood up. "My room—now."

No one said a word. A gesture to the waiter, Morgan's scrawled signature on the tab, and they were on their way. Within two minutes the elevator whisked them to the west wing of the fifth floor, where they held a block of rooms. As was his preference, Morgan's room was the closest to the elevator. He whipped out his keycard, remembering belatedly that he'd left his dirty clothes in a pile on the floor next to his bed, but hell, who cared about crap like that? After all this time together, they were like family, had seen each other in all kinds of situations and varying states of dress and undress. The important thing was to find out what the hell was going on with Hotch.

After the last team member, JJ, had entered the room and closed the door behind her, Morgan pulled out his phone once more and dialed Garcia. The analyst answered on the first ring.

"Okay, Baby Girl, we're back in my room and you're on speaker. What've you got?"

Garcia still sounded strained, troubled. "First of all, there's another printed message. Let me read it to you. It says, 'Thank you for your support and for expressing your concerns. Your messages are important to me. Brief answers: I am in solitary confinement at present. The Warden is consistent and fair, always letting me know what is expected of me and what the consequences of success and failure will be. Tell Jack that I'm trying hard to do exactly as I'm told so I can get home as soon as possible.'"

"That doesn't sound good," Rossi growled.

"And here's the tough part. Link your phone to your iPad, Morgan, so everybody can see this. Guys, there was a cheap little throwaway flash drive included in the envelope. You linked, Morgan?"

The total lack of nicknames and sweet chatter sent ice to Morgan's heart, to his guts. "We're linked, Penelope," he said tensely.

"Okay, this file is timestamped Saturday the tenth, at 21:44 hours," she said. "Here goes."

An image resolved on the screen of his iPad. It was unsteady, as though captured casually by an iPhone or a hand-held digital camera.

It was Aaron Hotchner—a too-thin Hotch, wearing what looked like surgical scrubs and a heavy blue cardigan, on his knees on a metal floor. There was a cot behind him, made up with a dark green wool blanket and a pillow. His gaze was focused just slightly to the left of the camera, as though whoever he was looking at held the camera in his right hand.

The expression on his face was stressed, fearful. Urgent.

JJ gasped and Prentiss turned away convulsively. Rossi cursed violently.

"If we're presuming eye contact," Spencer Reid said, "and whoever he's looking at is standing up, he's five-eight or five-nine."

There was dialog but no audio, then the sound kicked in.

"—_den, I wish to acknowledge my part in your wrongful incarceration. I—I betrayed my oath to preserve and protect the, uh, Constitution of the United States. I participated in a conspiracy to convict an innocent man. I'm ashamed of and sorry for my malfeasance. I beg permission to do what I can to make restitution for the wrongs I've done to you."_

"Garcia, freeze it there," Morgan ordered, and the recording abruptly paused. "He sounds sincere enough, but he's got to be reading some kind of script."

Prentiss, who'd long since composed herself, said, "No, his eyes don't track as though he's reading. I think he's saying something he's been forced to memorize."

"Christ, this makes me sick!" Rossi cut in, fuming. "There's _no way_ Hotch would get down on his knees to some goddamn UNSUB and fucking _apologize_ to him. Especially for something he couldn't possibly have done!"

JJ gave Rossi a sympathetic look. "Not of his own free will, I agree. But he obviously has no free will wherever he's being held."

"And he's probably got a weapon pointed at him, too." Morgan shook his head, his expression grim. "Go ahead, Garcia, play the rest of it."

"_I understand that the length and severity of my sentence are contingent upon my penitence and good behavior. I thank you for your continuing effort to make my time served as humane and dignified as is consistent with my offenses against you and the justice system."_

They watched in dismay as Hotch fell silent, bowed his head as though in prayer. Then the frame wobbled, and something flew through the air to land on the floor beside him.

"Oh my God!" JJ gasped. "It's a collar."

And as the five stunned agents watched, their missing Unit Chief meekly picked up the strange metallic thing and fastened it around his neck. Abruptly the video stopped.

For a moment there was only silence. Then Reid said, "Garcia, can you send that to each of us—and more importantly, screen caps of it?"

"It's sent. As for screen caps, just give me five minutes," the tech analyst replied. "Oh, I almost forgot—there was also a hand-printed postscript on the letter again. I don't want even to pop it into the scanner until Trace has been over it, but I'll snap a pic of it. It won't be high-res, but it'll be something to work with."

"A postscript?" asked JJ. "What did it say?"

Garcia seemed a little embarrassed that she'd forgotten to mention that detail before. Obviously, the video had deeply troubled her. "It says, 'Please don't try to find me.'"

"You're sure it's Aaron's printing?" Rossi asked.

"Positive, sir. Whenever he does an apostrophe-T, his T always looks kind of like a halfassed plus sign, you know what I'm talking about?"

Everyone nodded. It was a tiny detail, the kind of thing people never thought to talk about, but they'd all noticed it before.

"'Please don't try to find me,'" Morgan repeated. "I'm taking that to mean just the exact opposite: _get me the hell out of here!_"

"Unless," Reid pointed out, "he's afraid interference by the Team could cost him his life."

"So what, then, Reid? We're supposed to just leave him to finish out his so-called term in Furface's private hellhole?"

The young agent shook his head slightly. "Of course not. We just need to proceed with extreme caution. For example, his cell may be boobytrapped."

Morgan sighed. "Gotta confess I hadn't thought of that."

Prentiss had her own iPad open now and was fiddling with the first of the images to arrive, increasing the magnification. "Take a look at his wrists," she said. "They're scarred."

"Most likely from handcuffs," said Reid, and his voice was grim. "Used often, and tightly."

Prentiss frowned. "But why the need for handcuffs, if he's in some kind of cell?"

Rossi scowled. "I can think of several reasons, none of them pleasant."

"On the positive side, he's well groomed," JJ observed. "Clean-shaven, his nails are trimmed. This isn't a dungeon—although with metal walls, metal floor, it doesn't exactly look homey."

"There's something on the bed," Morgan said. "A legal pad, a book, a—what is that, a pear?"

Reid's screen caps appeared on his laptop rather than his phone, so he was working from larger, clearer images. "Yellow pear with a couple bites out of it," he said. "I can't make out the title on the paperback book. There's a deck of Bicycle brand playing cards there, too, and I think I see the bottom of a water bottle."

He began playing the audio with the sound turned up. Morgan really didn't want to hear it again—those horrible, unfamiliar words in that painfully familiar voice—but he listened anyway. Reid's face was tight with concentration, so Morgan fastened on that, wondering what the resident genius was deriving from the repeat.

When he shut it off, Reid said, "Judging from the reverb, I'd estimate that his cell is between eight by eight and ten by ten, and metal on all sides."

"OK, that makes sense, but answer me this," said Rossi. "Who the fuck's been cutting his hair? He isn't getting that look by do-it-yourselfing it with a pair of nail scissors." He looked up at Jennifer Jareau, who'd sidestepped Morgan's dirty laundry and was picking up the room phone on the night stand. "What's up, JJ?"

"Ordering an urn of coffee," she replied with a faint smile. "I figure we'll be here for a while."

Out of habit, Morgan addressed the image of Penelope Garcia on his iPad screen. "We'll keep working on this, Garcia, and you get Trace going on everything you've got there." His voice softened. "Thanks, Baby Girl, for asking us to view this in private. Everybody, this is on a need-to-know basis only. I'll be damned if I let every analyst at Quantico see him like this."

There was a murmur of agreement. While privacy was something the Team often had to surrender in the course of doing their jobs, this time they were closing ranks to protect their leader—and, more importantly, their _friend_. Strauss, the Team itself, and a handful of Trace techs and computer analysts would be the only ones to ever see this, if Morgan had anything to say about it.

"No problem," she said. "I don't want anyone else seeing this, either."

"Garcia," Rossi said as she was preparing to sign off, and his tone was unexpectedly sharp.

"Sir?"

"Where was that letter mailed from, and when?"

"Um, hang on," Penelope said. "Huh. Now that's weird. Mailed Tuesday from Buffalo, New York. Now how in the heck did he get from St. Louis to Buffalo in twenty-four hours, with a new prisoner in tow?"

"Never mind that," JJ said, looking up, startled. "How the hell did he get from Oklahoma City with a new prisoner to wherever he's holding Hotch in just twenty-four hours, too?"

"Unless this is a group," Morgan replied. "But that apology thing, that seemed pretty clearly aimed at an individual who thought he was an aggrieved party."

"Garcia, did you call Trace?" Rossi asked.

"No, sir, I'm sorry, I got distracted setting up—"

"Thank God," Rossi said. "Don't call them, not yet. Forgive me, Derek, I gotta step in here. This Claymore Guffey thing has smelled wrong from the fucking beginning, but it was _just like_ Hotch, even stuff that never went out to the media—"

"—but everyone in the _Bureau_ has access to it," Reid added.

"Son of a bitch," Morgan growled. "Fucking Guffey kidnapped himself, what you want to bet? Leveraging himself out of his financial problems—"

"—and his family problems," Emily added.

"Playing the copycat card," Rossi finished. "It fits the data. So we're just gonna have to keep this new info to ourselves for a little bit so we don't give Guff any new ideas. Good thing you ordered coffee, JJ—I believe we're gonna be here all night. And if this jagoff has caused us to waste a whole damn week chasing phantoms, we're gonna fry his sorry ass."


	30. Naming the Monster

A/N: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty**

**Naming the Monster**

"—but it won't be anything like the movie," a wide-eyed Hazelhurst sophomore explained to the alleged Joe McAfee on Sunday morning, July 18th, in the twelve-items-or-less line at Giant Eagle. "It's, like, so much darker, you know?"

Charpentier nodded absently, his attention focused on the woman two slots ahead of him—_Holy cats, she's writing a check? For a dozen eggs and a green pepper?_—and said, "You'll find that with all their work. Very cynical, sharp-edged." He consciously reminded himself to meet the boy's gaze and smile. "These are the guys who did _Cabaret_, after all. When's the production?"

"We have another month of rehearsals, then we'll run from August 14th through the 22nd."

He smiled again. "If I'm in the area, I'll try to drop in and see it," he said. "I've seen a few productions Sarah's put together in Altoona. Good stuff. I'm sure she'll bring out the best in everyone. Sorry, Linc, that's my phone, excuse me," he added as the Hawthornes' _Kingdom Comin'_ ringtone sounded on his cell.

"Hey, Bren," he said when he answered, simultaneously nudging his cart ahead one position in line. "How's it going?"

"Hi, Sarge," the familiar voice boomed. "How are you and your mystery-solving buddies doing?"

"Mystery-solving?"

"Oh, sorry! When you copied your lists, you left the failed copies in the wastebasket here. Where you and your friends were listing people who were involved in all the trials that that missing FBI agent was part of?"

The supermarket spun, all the oxygen left Norton's/Joe's lungs, perspiration popped out on his forehead, and he stared blankly into space.

"It wasn't hard to figure out that you have your eyes on that reward money," Bren continued gaily. "And pretty smart, too, looking at the stuff that Aaron Hotchner did before he was with the Bureau."

Norton made some vague sound and struggled to redefine reality.

"—wondering what the news has done to your research," she was saying. He realized that he had missed critical patches of the conversation.

"News?" he prompted.

"The other agent?" Bren prompted right back at him.

Frozen in disbelief, he stood in the checkout line as Bren Hawthorne explained about the dude in "—Kansas or Nebraska or something, anyhow, an FBI agent who was a federal prosecutor before, just like Aaron Hotchner. Taken exactly eight weeks later in exactly the same way," she added. "He's been gone over a week now. So if you guys are still working on it, you'll have to add that to your mix."

"Hey, Mr. McAfee," the Hazelhurst sophomore stage-whispered at him, nudging gently at his back. "You're up."

"I'll have to call you back," Norton told Bren. "I'm in line at Eagle. It's fascinating, though, I agree."

Simple things like putting produce on a counter, like sliding his debit card through the swiper and punching in his PIN number took on a surreal quality. _Some insane coincidence, or have I somehow—spawned a copycat?_

Half an hour later he let himself into the tiny, utilitarian apartment that was the official home of Joseph McAfee. He distributed his groceries into the fridge, the freezer, and the cupboard closest to the back door, deliberately preventing himself from racing to the computer to check on this _other agent_. A small and silly voice in him that muttered about _tricksy hobbitses_ made him smile slightly as he finally seated himself at the dining room table with his laptop open in front of him.

Any smile he still had left vanished as he viewed video from that morning's news magazines on Oklahoma City's local TV stations.

A darkly handsome woman with a faint middle-European accent sat composed and alert in a swivel chair. "Yes, Martha, I'm extremely concerned," said the woman, identified as Jarmila Guffey. "He's been gone for ten days now. There are strong correlations between Clay and this Aaron Hotchner, who was kidnapped in May. _Strong_ correlations. Both men are former prosecutors, both of them are now distinguished agents with the FBI.

"At the height of the Reaper's notoriety," she continued smoothly, "in February and March of 1998, Hotchner was the assigned profiler on the Reaper case, just two doors down from Clay Guffey's office with the federal prosecutor. I'd feel a lot more confident in law enforcement if they were looking more closely at these coincidences."

"Not to mention, of course," Martha-the-interviewer added, "that they were both taken on a Friday night from their own homes."

"And the detail with the cell phone," said Mrs. Guffey. "The battery taken out, thrown across the porch. And most tellingly, the kidnapper or kidnappers sent back Clay's wallet, his keys, his watch, and his Bureau credentials earlier this week. The very same thing was done with Agent Hotchner's possessions, even to being packed in newspapers. The very same thing! They seem to think that withholding this information will help their case, but without it, it's harder to see the connection between the two cases. I ask you, where's the advantage in that, Martha? I have to keep asking, because right now, the Bureau isn't listening!"

A stunned Norton Charpentier stared at the images on the screen, then glanced up at his calendar. The earliest he could return to the bunker would be Wednesday. How on earth would he contain his frustration, his anger, and his suspicions until then?

**~ o ~**

On Monday morning, July 19th, the 66th day of Aaron Hotchner's imprisonment, when Morgan got to the auxiliary conference room he found that only Spencer Reid was already there. He'd commandeered half a dozen whiteboards, and had started writing on one of them. So far, on the first, there were only the words:

WARDEN

ex-con with grudge

pompous

educated? autodidact?

"Nothing new there," Morgan said. "Not to criticize, but what's the sense in putting that up?"

Reid turned, his face weary. "The title is new," he said. "He uses it himself, and he expects Hotch to use it. It's significant. He has a name—or at least a title."

"What have the techs come up with?"

Reid shrugged. "I haven't been down there yet. Garcia's been doing all the follow-up. All I managed to do was determine what book Hotch had on his bed: _Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer,_ by James L. Swanson."

"You think that's significant?"

"I think it's significant, yes. I doubt that Hotch asked for that book specifically. More likely, it's a book that was already in the Warden's possession, and he thought it might interest Hotch."

Morgan held on to his temper. "What, you think he's trying to _please_ Hotch?"

"No," Reid said evenly, "I think he's playing mind games with him. I think everything this Warden guy does and says to Hotch is designed to bring about a certain desired behavioral outcome."

Dropping into a seat near the whiteboard, Morgan said, "He's got to know Hotch is an expert in the field, knows every trick in the book regarding interrogation, negotiation, criminal psychology. He's also got to be totally delusional about his own abilities if he thinks he can outwit Hotch."

Reid raised an eyebrow. "You think Hotch's whole penitence thing was an act, then?"

"I do. Are you telling me you don't agree?"

"I think it's pretty obvious Hotch was saying words he was forced to say, and that at this point, at least, he doesn't believe what he said. But I also saw real fear in his eyes, and there was a faint tremor in his hands."

Dave Rossi entered the room, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. He was closely followed by Emily Prentiss and Jennifer Jareau. Before Morgan could respond, Rossi said, "I caught what you said there, Reid. I hate to say it, but I noticed the tremor too. Damn Furface anyway!"

"Warden," corrected Morgan. "Reid thinks the UNSUB's self-declared title is important, and the more I think about it, I agree. I think we should use that title to refer to the bastard until we can finally ID him. The more we get inside his head, think the way he thinks, the faster we find Hotch."

Prentiss seated herself next to Morgan and nodded. "I agree. Let's explore that a little. Why would he choose to call himself Warden?"

Reid said, "You mean other than the obvious reason that he's imprisoned Hotch?"

"Yeah. This Warden strikes me as a meticulous, pedantic man. He would've chosen that title with great care. Now a warden is far more than just a jailer or the head of a prison—he has a responsibility to care for the inmates under his control."

JJ, now seated to Prentiss' left, placed her iPad on the conference table. "I agree. I think Warden views Hotch's confinement as not so much a prison situation as a penitentiary. And the whole concept of a penitentiary, obviously, is that it's a place where ideally inmates are made to feel penitent—truly sorry in their hearts for the crimes they committed—so when they're released they won't re-offend."

Prentiss nodded. "Both Hotch's first letter and those apologies he made on the video referred explicitly to penitence."

Morgan frowned. "So Warden won't be happy with just confining Hotch—he wants to break him, too. Convince him somehow that he's guilty of doing something he couldn't possibly have done."

Prentiss looked at him oddly, speculatively. Morgan didn't like that look; he never did. There were uncharted depths to that woman.

"That's the second time you've referred to something that Hotch 'couldn't possibly have done.' Remember what Rossi said about getting free of the 'St. Aaron' aura? You need to start thinking, if Hotchner did do something worthy of—of—well, not of prison, but guilty of some moral lapse, what kind of lapse would it likely be?"

Morgan shook his head. "Are you singing the Hotch the Love Machine song again?"

Emily looked up at him sideways, and he liked that even less than he'd liked the head-on version. She glanced over at Dave Rossi for a moment, then said, "Not so much Hotch the Love Machine as—" she paused, as if gathering her courage "—as the Hotchnergizer Bunny. Honest to God, Morgan, he and Haley were separated for about a year and a half in the mid-Nineties, and he must have been saving up a lot of adolescent hormones, because he sure sowed his share of wild oats."

"Just stop it, Prentiss—"

"Let me tell you how St. Aaron got into the BAU after only eight months in the Bureau," she said, and she sounded as unhappy as he suspected he was going to feel.

"No, don't," JJ said quickly. "Please don't, Em. I know the story." The two women stared at each other. "Really, I do. I have connections at State and the Pentagon." She flashed those huge blue eyes at Derek. "Morgan, I can't imagine that Hotch would—how did he have to express it? Participate in a conspiracy? Violate his oath to uphold the Constitution? Of course not! But he's—had a lapse or two."

From his corner, Rossi cleared his throat. "For what it's worth, I know the story, too. And I heard it from Jason Gideon himself. That was the day I lost what little respect I still had for Gideon outside of his profiling skills."

"But not for Hotch?" Prentiss prompted.

"Hell, no," Rossi growled. "Hotch was a kid, hungry for responsibility, and Gideon told him it'd actually reflect well on him. Jason's a user, nothing more, nothing less."

Morgan studied his hands for a minute. Hotchner had been in his thirties, maybe a youngster next to Gideon and Rossi, but no wet-behind-the-ears kid. "So, do I want to hear this story?"

"No," said Prentiss. "It has nothing to do with the situation he's in right now. I raised it only because he isn't perfect. He's made mistakes, and some of them were—lulus. Real lulus. And the other reason I raise it is that if this Warden creep wants to break Hotch, he'll start by finding things that Hotch is already ashamed of, and exploiting them."

"Well, then," Morgan said with relief, "unless the gory details are entirely relevant to Hotch's situation now, I see no reason for us to drag out his dirty laundry and sift through it. Our notes become a part of the permanent case file, people."

Penelope Garcia breezed into the conference room in one of her customary colorful getups—this time a yellow floral print dress with an oversized necklace of purple beads. "Did I hear the words 'dirty laundry'?" The strained look on Morgan's face stopped her. "Uh, I guess not. My bad, gotta remind myself to get my hearing checked sometime." Rounding the table, she took a seat opposite Rossi and tried to start over. "Sorry about being late. I wanted to go down and check with Technical in person, get their report on the flash drive and file."

Morgan seized on the change of subject. "They find anything?"

Garcia shook her head. "Nothing really useful. The camera used to take the video was a Sony Cyber-Shot, sold in thousands of retail outlets around the world. They didn't note this, but my personal feeling is it was an older model, since the anti-shake feature was either an early version or was missing entirely. So I'd say the camera was at least five or six years old, maybe even a year or two older."

"Don't suppose it was the camera shaking rather than Hotch's hands trembling, though," Rossi said sourly.

"Nope," Garcia said. "Frame-by-frame analysis showed a distinct tremor passing through his arms and hands on at least three separate occasions. Anyway, as we pretty much knew, the flash drive itself would be impossible to trace—it was an off-brand of Thai manufacture, 125 megabytes, and—"

"That's a pretty tiny thumb drive. Can you even still get those through general retail outlets?"

Garcia shrugged. "Not easily. But corporations buy them in mass quantities for promotional giveaways direct from the manufacturer's representatives. This particular run was vended to a California fast food chain in January of this year, but it never got its promotional stamp, so I'm guessing this was overage. The flash drive's a dead-end, folks. Now the video file itself was an .avi, length 52 seconds, file size of 19.2 MB."

JJ pursed her lips, then said, "I wonder if his using such a tiny drive means he has a whole store of them squirreled away, and we can expect more videos in the future."

"Part of me wants that," said Rossi, "and part of me doesn't. God only knows what we might see in the next video."

"I'll tell you what we _didn't_ see," JJ said, scrolling through her own images from the video. "When the collar appears—right there, look—Hotch isn't surprised. He doesn't even seem upset. There isn't even any tremor while he's putting the collar on. It's almost like—well, I can't imagine him liking it, but it's almost as if he's _relieved_." She looked around at her teammates sorrowfully. "As if there's an alternative to the collar, and he likes that even less."

A movement to his left distracted Morgan from JJ's iPad. Spencer Reid had turned another whiteboard toward them. On it, he had printed in blue dry marker the texts of both letters, including the postscripts, and the words that Hotchner had recited to satisfy Warden.

"What jumps out at you?" he said.

"Penitence," said Emily Prentiss.

"Solitary confinement," said David Rossi.

"Please don't try to find me," Morgan added. Every time he said, or even read, those words, his throat tightened. _We _will_ find you, man_, he whispered internally. _We'll find you and bring you home safe._

JJ shook her head. "Two things, and they're related. Warden lets him know what's expected of him, and he's trying to do exactly what he's told to do. Warden issues orders, and Hotch tries to obey them. _Tries_."

Reid looked at Penelope Garcia, who seemed flustered. "Don't look at me," she protested. "I'm not a profiler."

"You're a social engineer," Reid said, his voice flat and determined. "You're a profiler."

"It won't make sense."

"If it doesn't," Reid said, and he actually smiled, "it'll be our problem, not yours."

"Then, OK—the dude really loves his conjunctions," Garcia said. "This and that, this and that, 'humane and dignified,' 'crimes and injustices,' 'penitence and good behavior.' Like a teacher, like someone who persuades for a living."

Reid's smile broadened. "Let's talk about that," he told the assembled profilers.

**~ o ~**

"What's my name?"

Hotchner was long past caring about that part of the exchange. "Warden, sir," he answered.

"And yours?"

"Prisoner, sir."

_Meal ticket. Nothing but a meal ticket—and a hotline to Jack and the Team._

It was Wednesday, July 21st. He had ten more days left in the month he'd agreed to recite his statements as though he meant them. He looked up from his cot, hands in his lap, engaged eye contact with his captor, and put all the sincerity he could manage into those damn words.

Charpentier nodded curtly. "Put your chair in a position facing your cot, and get some rope," he commanded.

Since he'd had a haircut only a week or so before, Aaron wasn't sure what was going on. He didn't like Warden's clipped manner, but he wasn't going to waste energy speculating about it. He collected a few loops of nylon line, moved his water, his legal pads, and the latest of the paperback books Warden had supplied from the seat of the chair to the cot.

"You know what to do now," Warden said.

"Yes, sir," he said woodenly. He seated himself and attached his ankles to the front legs of the chair so that his feet didn't make contact with the floor. When he was done, the handcuffs fell to the floor beside his chair with a clink.

"Hands behind you," Warden said.

He bent slightly and picked them up, then fastened them on his wrists.

Soft clicks, and the door opened. The damn canvas and Velcro band was secured around his upper body. He wondered whether it was a good sign or a bad one that lately he'd been submitting to these procedures without argument, or even much apprehension.

Norton, in khakis, a blue plaid cotton shirt, and a tan jacket, seated himself on the cot facing Aaron. He'd brought along his laptop again. Aaron hoped there would be no new home videos of the Charpentier family in happier days. The last video'd haunted him for days; it haunted him still, to tell the truth.

Unsure whether he was supposed to look at Warden or avert his eyes, he opted to look at him as though he was just a visitor who had dropped by for a chat. _Yeah, like I have a social life in here…. _

Warden seemed unconcerned about what Hotch did with his eyes. "Tell me about Claymore Guffey," he said.

"Who?" Aaron blurted.

"Claymore Guffey. Allegedly an FBI agent."

The name sounded familiar. He ran through his mental Rolodex. _Oh, God. Right. Tall and thin. Reddish beard._ Hotchner didn't know much about the guy, just what he'd seen when the team had been in—Nebraska? No, Oklahoma.

He wondered whether JJ had finally gotten around to getting her profiler's certification and the Bureau had brought in Guffey as the new media liaison. He could see no other reason for Warden ever even to have heard of him. Guffey was a fucking nonentity, long on charm and short on talent.

"Is he—the new spokesman for, for the Team? For the Bureau?" he hazarded.

"Don't try for cute, Prisoner. It doesn't look good on you."

_Cute?_

"I've met him once or twice," Aaron said. "Other than that, his name means nothing to me."

"So you allege that he's a real person?"

_A what? What the fuck else could he be? _He considered his options for response carefully.

"Yes, sir, he's a real person. The last I heard, he was assigned to the OKC field office."

"Explain to me, Profiler, why the news media claim that I've also abducted Claymore Guffey."

And even before he addressed the notion of Guffey's having been kidnapped, he thought, _Profiler. He called me Profiler. That's a fucking first…._

Aaron looked his captor dead in the eyes. "_Did_ you abduct him?"

Charpentier made a scoffing sound. "Of course not, you ass. That's not even worthy of an answer. What does the FBI derive from that kind of horseshit? Where's the profit in cheap tricks? Is it supposed to work like on the TV shows? Am I supposed to be so proud and so arrogant that I start making anonymous phone calls, telling them that it wasn't me?"

In that moment, Hotch found that he was still entirely capable of finding his inner Aaron-Fucking-Hotchner, even when tied to a chair. Everything that wasn't case-related simply vanished from the equation.

"If they said he's missing, then he's missing," Hotchner told him crisply, unable to control the authority that crept into his tone and manner when he was on the job. "Faking disappearance could cause them a world of hurt for the prosecution when it's time to bring the real UNSUB to trial."

"By 'real UNSUB,' you'd be referring to me."

"Yes, sir," Aaron said without hesitation, without even blinking. "Meaning you. So Guffey has definitely disappeared. How long ago did this happen?"

"A week ago Friday."

_Huh. So he's managed to scrape up enough competence to pose a threat to_ _somebody_.

"And is the Bureau drawing parallels between his—disappearance—and mine?"

"I've snagged some of the video coverage," Charpentier said, opening his laptop and tapping keys. "You watch it; tell me what you learn from it." He turned the computer around and double-clicked on a video file.

For the next few minutes, Aaron watched silently as Sunny Guffey—whom he recognized, he realized, and as soon as he caught the Boston connection he recalled that he'd seen her in the Federal Building, buzzing in and out of one of the offices on the same floor where he'd been working on the Reaper profile—as Sunny Guffey indicted the Bureau for failing to follow through on what she saw as obvious similarities.

He watched two local press conferences, a passionate one by local LEOs, and a cooler, more detached one conducted by JJ Jareau. His heart ached with love, with pride as he watched her. He barely caught what she said, because he was transfixed by the sight of Morgan in suit and tie—he must be acting Unit Chief again—milling around in the background with Prentiss and Rossi.

_My own happy family video_, he thought, with pangs of affection so sharp they were painful.

When the videos ended, when Charpentier shut the lid of the laptop and glared at Hotchner, what he said was, "Was Mrs. Guffey telling the truth? Did you return my creds and my billfold to—"

"I did," Warden replied. "I removed the photos of your son, so I could make the pictures for you to keep here—" he nodded at the five-by-seven portraits that decorated the cell wall "—so it's clear that the FBI is involved in this. Otherwise, they wouldn't know anything about it."

Hotchner considered all the evidence before him. "I'd like to know more about what's been going on in Guffey's life," he said. "His marriage, his performance ratings, his finances." He gradually became aware that Norton Charpentier was regarding him with a weird mixture of amusement and awe. "What?" he said. "You asked me what I thought."

"You're solving it," Warden said with a grin. "You're sitting here and trying to solve it. What do you need to know?"

Aaron decided to keep the illusion going and treat his captor like a colleague. "Look," he said, "Claymore Guffey's a legend in his own mind, but I wouldn't count on him to find his own ass with both hands and a GPS. I suspect—I can't prove it, but I _suspect_—that he's in trouble, in marital trouble, in financial trouble, probably in professional trouble, and he's looking for a way to wash his hands of the whole mess without looking like the fucking coward he is."

"That sounds like a fairly vicious assessment, Agent Hotchner," Charpentier said, and it took a substantial act of will for Aaron not to respond triumphantly to his captor's use of not only his name, but his goddamn _title_.

Aaron looked at him blandly. "Got to call 'em like I see 'em, Warden."


	31. Playlist, Part Two

A/N: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-One**

**Playlist, Part Two**

Representative Cynthia Allgood smiled thinly at Emily Prentiss. She seemed tired and stressed out. "Of course I remember Aaron," she replied. "A hard-working, thoroughly professional attorney. I gather that he hasn't—been found yet?"

"He hasn't," Prentiss said. "Not in the sense that we know where he's being held."

"Then—then you believe he's still alive?"

"We do."

She needed to rattle this annoying woman with her perfect hair and her Botoxed brow. She reached down to her bag and took out her iPad. She powered it up and located a few seconds of video from May: Aaron on his hands and knees in his garage, the man with extravagant sideburns bending over him, applying the cattle prod again. Hotch convulsing, his features twisted with agony, as he toppled flat.

Rep. Allgood's hands flew to her face and she mewled, "Oh, my God!" in horror. "Oh, God—stop. Enough! Nobody deserves that. Nobody!"

"Will you help me?" Emily asked.

"Of course, but—how? I haven't seen Aaron in years and years!"

"Let me show a couple more images. Do you recognize this man?"

Rep. Allgood peered at them carefully. "No," she said, shaking her head.

"I have a list here, ma'am, every witness, every court official, every defendant in the cases where you served beside Agent Hotchner. Will you review these names, please? Let me know if any name leaps out at you as someone who might have a grudge against Agent Hotchner. I also need for you to search your memory for relatives and friends of these people. This guy didn't come out of nowhere, and he has a huge hate on for Agent Hotchner. He still has him—"

"You're sure? You're sure he's alive?"

"We have persuasive evidence that he still has Hotch and he's still abusing him," Emily told her coldly. "He's determined to break him. Aaron's been in this guy's clutches for seventy days now. Seventy days. He's thin; he's probably being starved. Please help us find him and bring him home."

Cyn Allgood silently studied the list of names for a few minutes, then finally shook her head. "I'm sorry," she said. "That's an unhappy crew of defendants, but _all_ convicted defendants are unhappy. Surely you know that!"

"Of course," Emily said soothingly. "But this guy, whoever he is, it's to a whole 'nother level."

Allgood suddenly looked up from the list and studied Prentiss intensely. "You're playing with my head," she said bitterly. "How would you know whether Aaron's thin, whether he's being starved?" She thrust the list back at Emily. "I don't appreciate cheap emotional tricks."

_Good_, Emily thought, her face betraying none of her satisfaction. _You're right where I want you._

"We got this in the mail a week ago," she said. She located an image in her iPad and thrust it at the congresswoman: Hotch in the video, on his knees, thin, drawn, frightened.

"Oh, no," Cynthia Allgood moaned. "Oh, no, Aaron, no, no—" She raised horrified eyes to Emily's. "Oh, God, and he's well groomed! He's shaved and his—his hair's cut, and—" She cupped her hands over her mouth and scrambled out of her seat with a garbled apology.

She returned a few minutes later with a lot less makeup on and her perfect hair in disarray.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I've prosecuted enough sex offenders in my day to understand what it means when you keep your prisoners all prettied up. Oh, God, poor Aaron, and he's just—just the kindest man, the gentlest—" She burst into renewed tears. "What can I tell you? What can I do?"

Emily considered telling her straight up that they were reasonably sure there wasn't a sexual component to Hotchner's captivity—or if there was, it was an afterthought—but she decided to hold back on it until she had heard what Rep. Allgood had to contribute.

"Just free-associate," she told the congresswoman gently. "Tell me everything you can recall about Aaron Hotchner. His behaviors, his attitudes, anything."

Allgood dabbed at her eyes. "Fine, OK, OK. Very sharp. Very smart. Very focused. But you know that. Did you ever work with him?"

"He's our Team leader," Emily said. "I've worked beside him every day for four years."

Allgood nodded. "Then—he really hates defense attorneys. Sometimes I wondered whether he hated them more than the defendants, I mean, it was just really, really personal with him."

She sniffled into her handkerchief. "And he's funny. We had this case, Wassermann, it was—this one here—" She patted a section of the list of names. "—kiddie porn producers and merchants, and this one guy, Sinclair, he was just—oh, a whole bushel of sleaze, OK? And he's like trying to _negotiate_ with a drugstore in his neighborhood, trying to get a business rate to buy cosmetics to make up these little girls. And whenever Sinclair walked into the room, Aaron would lean over and start singing that old Gary Puckett song:

_Beneath your perfume and make-up,  
>You're just a baby in disguise,<br>And though you know that it's wrong to be  
>Alone with me<br>That come-on look is in your eyes  
>Oh-woh-woh, young girl, get out of my mind<br>My love for you is way out of line_ …

"I slept with him," she added, her face stony. "Aaron, I mean, not slimeball Sinclair. Not when he was still married. After they broke up. Did you—?"

Emily shook her head. "Not enough time for that kind of thing in the BAU," she said in as neutral a tone as she could manage. "Even if it weren't cause for dismissal."

"I was still married," Allgood continued. "We were going through one of those difficult patches and Aaron was there to pick up the pieces and make me feel—well, desirable. He's as intense when it comes to—"

Prentiss deliberately tuned out the intimate details of the affair. Eventually, she reasoned, they would rescue Hotch and he would resume his place at the head of the Team, and work would go a whole lot more smoothly if her brain wasn't full of images of him being less than professional.

**~ o ~**

Spencer Reid lowered himself to his knees on the living room carpet at Jessica Brooks's house on Sunday, July 25th. Behind him, his tongue sticking out with concentration, Jack Hotchner carefully tied Reid's necktie. "My daddy always wants me to tie the knots in his ties," the boy explained. "He says I do it the best."

He'd never been to church with the boy before, but if they were going to make it to the ice show in time, they'd have to leave directly following the service, so—Spencer Reid was going to the Sunday service with Jack, his aunt, and his uncle.

"Dear heaven," a still unfamiliar voice said. Sean Hotchner, in dress shirt and slacks, stood in the doorway grinning. "As soon as I learned to tie them, my big brother started having me tie his ties for him. He said I did it better than he did." He fished a tie from the pocket of his sport coat. "Do you think you can do mine when you've finished with Dr. Reid's?"

Jack barely batted an eyelash. "Sure, Uncle Sean," he said.

Jess Brooks appeared behind Aaron's brother, classy looking in a bright pink floral dress and a straw hat. "Sean, you won't have a problem with us, will you? We're pretty Rite One, High Church."

Reid noted that nobody was asking _him_ whether he'd have a problem with whatever Rite One was. And whatever High Church was. One of the unadvertised drawbacks of genius; people just presumed that you _knew_ stuff. And, of course, more often than not, he _did_. He'd been baptized Lutheran, but for his parents, church had been pretty much a holiday social thing. He'd taken Comparative Religion 201; he knew the basic Christian tenets well enough that JJ and Will's Methodist pastor had accepted him as Henry's godfather. The finer points between the Hotchner family Presbyterian services and the Brooks family Episcopalian services eluded him.

But he figured he'd pick them up pretty quickly.

He climbed to his feet and Sean took his place in front of the solemn little blond boy.

He'd always figured that Jack's light hair came from his mother's side of the family, but Sean had told him the night before, over a few beers, that even Aaron had been a blondie at birth. The jury would be out until puberty as to what would happen with Jack's hair.

An hour later, Reid sat on one side of Jack and his Uncle Sean sat on the other in a pew at Jess's church. He'd browsed Jess's Book of Common Prayer on the way to the church and had determined that Rite I was Rite II with archaic language and sentence constructions. Piece o' cake.

The organ pealed, the congregation rose to their feet, and the celebrant and her attendants processed in as the choir sang a rousing hymn.

"You know what?" Sean Hotchner said to his nephew. "When I was a little boy, my big brother told me that the words to that song were 'Lead On, O Kinky Turtle.' And I _believed_ him."

Reid consulted his bulletin. The hymn was _Lead On, O King Eternal_.

He suppressed a grin. _Gotta add that to the not-St.-Aaron file._

After another hymn, the children were dismissed for Sunday School, leaving Reid beside the younger Hotchner brother.

"I noticed," he whispered to Sean, "that you say 'my big brother,' not 'your dad,' when you're talking to Jack."

Sean bit his lip and shook his head. "I can't," he whispered back. "It's hard enough imagining my brother—you know. Missing. It's like I'm afraid to remind Jack of his dad. Like I'm afraid he's gonna lose it. Hell, _I'm_ close to losing it sometimes. I wake up in the middle of the night and I start wondering, is this a psychic flash? Is something terrible happening to Aaron right now? Is he dead? Is he afraid? Is he screaming for help, for me? For Mom?"

"We all get that," Spencer confessed softly. "I don't know any way around it. I'm not even sure I _want_ a way around it." Seeing the distress on Hotchner's face, he added, "You want to step outside for a few minutes with me?"

"Yeah."

The two men slipped out of the pew and ducked out a side door of the church. When they'd gained a little distance from the mother comforting her fretful toddler and the usher grabbing a cigarette, Sean murmured, "Are you sure he's alive?"

"Positive," Reid replied, wondering why Sean hadn't raised any substantive issues the night before, when it had just been two guys, drinking beer on Jess's patio and listening to a local alt-rock station. Maybe he just felt more secure asking tough questions in public venues. Some people were like that. "We didn't just get a letter," he confided. "Keep it to yourself, but we got some visual confirmation that he's alive."

Sean inhaled noisily. "Jesus, is he—"

"He looks OK," Spencer assured him. "He does. He has it together. I mean—he looks like a man who's held against his will, but no visible injuries. He's clean and fed. He has access to books and playing cards. Look, Hotch's whole professional life revolves around saving people who've been put in this kind of situation. He's probably better equipped, psychologically and physically, to come through this OK than almost anyone else in the country."

"How close are you to finding him? I mean, really. Be straight with me."

"Closer than we were," Spencer said. "We got a lot of clues from the video—"

"_Video__!_ Jeez, I thought you meant—"

"Shush." Reid glanced around nervously. "You can't tell anyone, not even Jess. It's important that we keep this very quiet. Yes, we got video of Hotch that was taken about two weeks ago. We saw him, heard him speaking. He has it together, Sean, and _we_ need to keep it together, too. And we got a lot of clues from that video."

"Like? Come on, Reid, give me some hope."

_Morgan's gonna kill me_. "We were already confident he was being kept somewhere in the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania area, but now we have reason to believe he's being kept in a metal cargo container that's been converted to—to kind of a cell. We think it's probably located in an air-conditioned warehouse, which suggests produce shippers. So we're all over trucking hubs and shipping docks, for starters."

"Sure," Sean said, nodding eagerly now. "And that's something I can keep an eye out for, too. Our catering company deals with produce shippers all the time."

"Don't do anything stupid—"

Sean Hotchner grinned. "_Nobody_ in our family's impulsive, Reid. You ought to know that by now."

Reid made it through the rest of the service without incident. He wondered whether there would be a backlash to his telling the younger Hotchner brother more than people were supposed to know, but he'd felt deeply motivated to give Sean a more concrete hope to cling to.

The same hymn that had started the service closed it, the song that Reid would ever after associate with kinky turtles, although this time the congregation joined the choir. As he stood there with his open hymnal, he wondered why Christianity used so much martial imagery, as if blood and guts and death somehow equaled belief.

Then he got to the second verse:

_Lead on, O King eternal,  
><em>_Till sin's fierce war shall cease,  
><em> _And holiness shall whisper  
><em>_The sweet amen of peace. _  
><em>For not with swords loud clashing,<br>__Nor roll of stirring drums; _  
><em>With deeds of love and mercy<br>_ _The heavenly kingdom comes. _

And that's what telling Sean the truth had been: a deed of love and mercy.

**~ o ~**

Early on Monday morning, July 26, Emily Prentiss sat down in a sunny breakfast nook opposite Her Honor, Judge Lily Emerson-Leland, and her husband, U.S. Navy officer Chan Leland. She wasn't thrilled that the man was present; in her experience, women rarely opened up about premarital indiscretions in the presence of their spouses, but the judge had insisted that it was non-negotiable: _No Chan, no chance_, more or less.

Her Honor was a slim, cool ash blonde; her husband was an engaging, thickset man with a broad smile and buzzcut red hair. They held hands naturally, not like a couple trying to send a deliberate message of a united front. It was, well, _sweet_.

Prentiss repressed a sigh of jealousy.

"OK," she said, laying her iPod on the table but now powering it up. "When you spoke to Agent Morgan, you said that you had only vague memories of Aaron Hotchner. I know that it's been a long time since you were colleagues, and that's why I'm here. One of my skills is cognitive interviews. Helping people recover memories lost through time or trauma."

"I've managed to recover quite a bit on my own," said Lily Emerson-Leland. She reached into the breast pocket of her blouse. "And I spent an hour or so among my files. This is a list of the cases where we worked together and all of the defendants and witnesses. What else do you need from me?"

"Excuse me for interrupting," Chan Leland said, "but how sure are you that Hotchner's still alive?"

"We have persuasive evidence that he was alive on July 10th," she replied, "and indications from his abductors that they intend to keep him alive."

"What do they want?" Leland persisted. "Why are they doing this? Is it even a 'they'? Lily told me that this is supposed to be some jerk's notion of a private jail."

"That's true, sir," Emily replied. "We haven't entirely ruled out multiple UNSUBs, but current evidence seems to point to a single actor. But as I was saying, Judge Emer—"

"_Lily_, please. I think we're going be getting down and dirty, so it might as well be 'Lily' and 'Chan,' Agent Prentiss."

Emily surveyed the Lelands with renewed interest. _Down and dirty, huh? Fine, let's get the party started._

"My principal interest is in anything—anything at all—that Aaron Hotchner might have done that anyone could have interpreted, or misinterpreted, as illegal, unethical, unprofessional. If we can determine which of his actions angered our UNSUB, we're on track to identify him."

Lily studied her nails for a few seconds. "I found Aaron Hotchner to be unfailingly competent, honest, and hard-working. I'm sure all of our defendants loathed him, and quite possibly a defense attorney or two, but, no. Absolutely nothing unethical or unprofessional."

"That's his professional side," Emily said. "How about his personal behavior?"

The Lelands exchanged glances. "Before I met Chan, and after Aaron and his wife separated, we had a—I can't call it a fling. We were both adults, responsible, careful. We were involved. It lasted for about three months—during which time we were _not_ serving on the same team; I was never one for fooling around with colleagues—and we parted amicably after I met Chan and—" She flashed her husband a warm smile. "—I met Mr. Right. Later I heard that Aaron's wife had returned. I—we, actually—Chan and I ran into them at two or three social events over the next few months, then he got the Bureau bug.

"It's important to both of us that he be found and rescued," she said, her voice urgent. "He's a good man, a kind and responsible guy."

"If you need anything from us, anything at all," her husband said, "we want the very best for Aaron Hotchner."

_Hmm_.

Prentiss suddenly realized that both Lelands tended to glance to their left, her right, toward the kitchen wall, as they referred to Hotch. She resisted the impulse to turn in her chair and see what they were looking at.

"I'd like for you to watch a little bit of video," she said, reaching for her iPod. "It's—it's not pretty to see, I know, but what I want you to look at is the other man. Take your time, think carefully. We _have_ to identify this guy."

She played for them fifteen seconds of the abduction in the garage, including some rough moments, but they also included some of the best available images of the creep who called himself Warden. Lily winced and looked away; Chan Leland watched intently, his face dark with anger and determination, then he nudged his wife and said, "Honey, come on. Suck it up and look at this guy."

She played the footage again, and Chan said, "He has bland features. Except for the brushy sideburns, he could be anyone. I've seen dozens like him in the service."

"And the goober haircut," Lily added. "And they're probably both fake. Sorry, Agent Prentiss, he looks vaguely like a lot of guys and not much like anyone I can recall. He certainly wasn't involved in any of the cases I prosecuted with Aaron."

On her way out, Emily glanced at the kitchen wall—and froze. "What—what a lovely family you have!" she exclaimed at the formal portrait: Lily, in a suit of dark rose, Chan in his dress uniform, and their three daughters in their Sunday best. The eldest was a tall, intense girl in her early teens with long, dark hair. The younger two were chunky, beaming redheads like their dad.

She turned back, and the Lelands had their arms tightly around each other's waists. "Yes," Chan said, his voice crisp and authoritative. "Those are _our_ very special young ladies, Lydia, Maura, and Eileen."

"Which one is which?" Emily said, keeping her voice matter-of-fact.

"That's in order, eldest to youngest," Chan replied. "They're the pride of our lives." His wife gazed up at him raptly, adoringly.

"Just beautiful," Emily assured them, and beat a retreat for her car and the highway back to Quantico.

On the drive, she hummed the old Supremes song to herself.

_This love we're contemplating, is worth the pain of waiting.  
>We'll only end up hating the child we may be creating.<em>

_Love Child, never meant to be,_  
><em>Love Child, different from the rest.<em>

Lydia Leland's father, she was almost positive, was Aaron Hotchner. And Chan Leland knew it. And didn't care. Would fight to claim her as his own.

Emily wondered whether the girl would ever realize how fortunate, how thoroughly loved she was.

**~ o ~**

"So how many are you going for this time?" Charpentier asked him as the door clanged shut on the exercise cage.

Aaron Hotchner glanced up at the horizontal bar. "At least eight," he said, and hoped he sounded more positive than he felt. He'd been stalled on six for a while now, and regardless of how many pushups he did in his cell, his arms and upper body felt like spaghetti when he was done on the horizontal bar.

Charpentier set the boombox on the little table beside the cage—lately he'd moved it over so Aaron could hear it better during his exercise periods—and turned it on. It held eight CDs, all of them containing about 150 MP3 files on perpetual shuffle. Some of Nortie's choices were—odd (_"Fish Heads"? Really?_)—but the man who lived for classical music seemed to have an equally encyclopedic knowledge of pop stuff, and happily talked about it.

Today, random shuffle started with Toni Basil.

"Your wife," he said abruptly, turning back toward the cage. "Haley. What was your song?"

Hotchner stared at him for a moment, wondering how "Hey, Mickey" could possibly have called that question to mind, then said, "Oh, God. No, you don't want to know."

"It can't be any sappier than Diana's and mine."

Aaron looked at his captor and wondered what the advantage would be in refusing to answer. Or lying. "'I Just Called to Say I Love You,'" he admitted finally. "Stevie Wonder. Then later on, Bananarama's 'Venus.'"

Norton nodded slightly. "With us, it was Art Garfunkel's 'I Only Have Eyes for You,' and later on, and this hurts even to confess, Billy Joel's 'I Love You Just the Way You Are.'" Neither of us talked about it, but I'm pretty sure we were both thinking of my hugely obese body."

"How the hell did you lose all that weight, anyway?" Aaron asked. "Exercise? Diet?"

"Little of both," said Charpentier. "Once I was dead, there was nothing to do but walk through the mountains and not eat."

"Dead? I'm sorry, what?"

Warden's expression was bleak. "I left that life behind. Totally. Utterly. Norton Charpentier died in Alaska in September of '98. I'm a new man now. In every sense of the word." He sounded neither pleased nor proud as he turned and stalked off to do one of his periodic shakedowns of Aaron's cell.

_Crap_. That finally explained why the Team hadn't followed through on investigating Norton Charpentier. As the weeks passed, as his hopes of an early rescue had faded, he'd wondered what the holdup was with the Team. Shaking his head slowly, he watched Norton-whatever-the-hell-he's-calling-himself-these-days-Charpentier enter his cell.

As Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" began—a goddamn anthem as far as Aaron was concerned—he stripped off his sweater and leaped for the horizontal bar.

He should have warmed up first; he managed only four pull-ups before he pooped out.

One of the advantages to the exercise cage (Was there a better word for it? He wondered that sometimes. "Exercise cage" always made him think of gerbils) was that on the occasions when Warden did these shakedowns, looking for God only knows—some weapon Aaron had managed to fashion out of God-knows-what and hide somewhere, perhaps?—he didn't have to stand there cuffed to the window for the better part of an hour.

Another was the armchair Warden had moved into the cage. Now, he and Norton sometimes had semi-civilized conversations, seated face-to-face, separated only by bars and Aaron's captivity. All that was missing was the brandy and cigars. The worst part—and it was bad, really bad—was that sometimes he was so pathetically grateful for small kindnesses like these that he almost forgot that he was a prisoner, locked away underground and always one wrong move away from Warden's fucking Enforcer.

Sometimes he even forgot to wonder what the hell the Team was doing. He'd been here for 77 days now. Seventy-seven days without hugging his son, without seeing the sun, without talking to other human beings than Warden. Without anything to eat except fruit, bunny food, and those goddamn peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches.

As Billy Joel sang "Allentown," he sank into the armchair and cracked open a V-8 Fusion.

He peered into the gloom toward the elevator. He wondered whether Charpentier had been telling the truth when he'd told him that the elevator was booby-trapped with explosives; that entering the wrong code would blow his rescuers to bits and destroy the elevator, ensuring that nobody would ever enter the bunker again. He would slowly starve to death.

He'd believed Charpentier when he'd said it; the man had sounded completely persuasive.

He still believed him, he realized. When Charpentier told him about the booby-trap, he'd seen the pain that crossed the little man's face. An attachment had formed between them; Nortie didn't want him to die.

He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

When Warden returned, he was singing along absently with Duran Duran:

_In touch with the ground  
>I'm on the hunt I'm after you<br>A scent and a sound, I'm lost and I'm found  
>And I'm hungry like the wolf…. <em>

_**~ o ~**__  
><em>

As usual, there was no contraband in Prisoner's room. From the beginning, when he allowed the steam iron, Norton had expected the lawyer to take metal things apart and try to fashion keys or weapons for himself out of them. He regularly patted the man down, examined the cell carefully. Sometimes he examined the inside of his captive's mouth. Apparently, however, he wasn't much of a handyman. He might have a whole arsenal secreted in his rectum, but Charpentier wasn't worried about that; when he was handcuffed he couldn't reach his ass if his life depended on it anyway.

He'd hated the whole rectum-and-privates thing in prison. The guards had known perfectly well that a man of his girth, 350 pounds, hell, he couldn't even _wipe_ himself properly, let alone use his asshole as a covert pocket. Their mockery, their laughter, their deliberate roughness—it still cut him to the quick all these years later. Much as he loathed what the lawyer had done to him, he couldn't inflict that kind of misery on him. Maybe if he had a fair shot at one of those guards, he'd feel differently. He wondered about that sometimes.

For now, Prisoner lolled in the green flowered armchair Nortie'd wrestled down to the bunker the previous week, head thrown back, a bottle of V-8 resting on his thigh. Duran Duran—_was that their only hit? He couldn't think of another thing they'd done_—played from the boombox and Prisoner seemed to be singing along.

Norton returned to the cage and sat down in the chair that faced the lawyer's. He opened up his own bottle of V-8 Fusion and took a long drink.

"I need to explain your punishment to you," he said.

Prisoner's head rose, his eyes popped open in surprise, probably wondering what he'd done this time. He didn't ask, through. He just sat there, forearms on his thighs, looking at Norton through those squinty brown eyes. Not saying a word.

"Recall, if you will, that on the tenth of this month, I insisted that you give your statements on your knees. This was part of your punishment for your nasty crack about my son."

"Part?" Prisoner said, one eyebrow elevated slightly. "You told me that—"

"Part," Charpentier cut him off. "That was the part I expected from you. The rest of it was something I had to do." The lawyer observed him suspiciously. "Yes, something I had to do," he repeated with a faint smile. "I took video of your statements that day."

The lawyer swallowed. There was no longer anything relaxed about his posture.

"I sent it to your sister-in-law," Norton said. "So your family and friends would witness your submission to me. So your son would see it."

If there had been any color left in the lawyer's face, he no doubt would have lost it, but he already sported a prison pallor. He stared at Norton as if hoping Charpentier was about to chuckle and say, _No, no, just funning you…._ His fingers twisted together and his lips tightened into a miserable line.

"Cat got your tongue?" Norton said teasingly.

His prisoner looked at him for a few more seconds before he seemed to reach some kind of internal decision. He drew a deep breath and said, "Fuck you."

"I _did_ warn you that you would suffer, Prisoner."

"Fuck you and your fucking dead wife and kid," the lawyer said, his expression chilly and his enunciation quiet, controlled, but crisp enough for the courtroom. "Fuck you all. Fuck you for your kiddie porn and your self-serving lies and trying to destroy my life because you got caught."

Norton grinned. "Feel better getting that off your chest?"

The lawyer's face could have been carved from granite. "No."

Charpentier matched him, stone for stone. "Pity. We were getting on so well. Think how awkward it will be when the trial transcripts arrive. When you can see your perfidy right there, in black and white."

"The statements are fucking bullshit, Nortie. We nailed you fair and square."

Charpentier shook his head slightly. "Tell you the truth, if you're as honest as you think you are, there's nothing in the world I can do to you that will hurt you as badly or as deeply as reading those transcripts."

His prisoner didn't bat an eye. "Bring 'em on."

Norton stood up and fished the remotes out of his pocket. "I suppose you're going to pitch a fit and refuse to connect the lead to your collar?"

Hotchner sat motionless for a few more seconds, then sighed. "No, sir," he said wearily. He rose to his feet and walked over to where the lead dangled from the main line.

Norton eyed the remote, watching as the little amber light turned green, indicating that the connection had been made. With the other remote, he triggered the door and it slid open.

His prisoner walked quietly and without incident back to his cell, then appeared at the barred window. When he was cuffed, Charpentier delivered the latest batch of resources. It included a few minor luxuries, little treats to reward his prisoner's ongoing cooperation that by right he now ought to take away, but he didn't bother to remove them from the cartons. The man had been thoroughly humiliated; there was no sense in loading on extra punishments.

"Eventually," he said, "you'll pay for your rudeness. You understand that, right?"

The lawyer's voice remained cold, emotionless. "Sure. Why not?" Almost dismissive.

"Would you like to see yourself on video?"

One blink. Two. "No."

Norton moved his right hand toward the pocket with the Enforcer. "A little respect would be nice."

"Sorry. No, _sir._"

"Better. I guarantee, Prisoner, that each punishment will always be worse than the last. If I were you, I'd think long and hard over exactly how much you're prepared to pay for the privilege of mouthing off before you decide to be rude to me. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, sir." If a whisper could be sullen, it would sound just like that.

"Do you think your loved ones would enjoy seeing you under the influence of the Enforcer?"

"No." Almost inaudible. "No, sir."

"Then be careful not to punish them. My wife and daughter paid for your poor _professional_ conduct. Don't make your friends and family suffer for your _personal_ conduct."

Prisoner was leaning his head against the wall, his whole posture one of miserable surrender. "No, sir," he breathed. "I'm sorry. Really, I'm sorry."

Charpentier fought the urge to be magnanimous, to forgive. To let up on his prisoner would do neither of them any favors. "Yes," he replied calmly. "Yes, Prisoner. You will be."


	32. Famous Failed Profiles

A/N: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-Two**

**Famous Failed Profiles**

Twenty-four hours after Warden's announcements and threats, Aaron Hotchner still felt as though he'd done a few dozen pullups—weak, shaky, and exhausted. Scared, too, both of whatever Nortie might have in mind as a punishment for his most recent—_dumb, stupid, juvenile_—outburst against the self-righteous little dickwad, and by one thing that he'd said.

Something about—nothing Nortie did could possibly hurt Aaron as much as reading the trial transcripts and seeing his guilt would hurt him. Something like that. The little guy seemed incredibly confident about it, and that worried Aaron. He frequently dismissed his captor as delusional, but _damn,_ though he hated to admit it, for the most part the guy was actually pretty well grounded.

Seated on his cot, his legs drawn up against his chest in what had become his default posture since his abduction, he nibbled one of those godawful sandwiches and reviewed for probably the two-hundredth time the case against the man who'd once been Norton Charpentier.

Wassermann and Sinclair had been the brains of the outfit, although not the smartest of the defendants. Norton Charpentier had been the smartest of them, and he'd known it, had held the whole prosecution in contempt. A whale of a man with protruding ears (he must have got them fixed, too), and the product of the best schools, he was twin brother to Gerald Sinclair's showy, attention-seeking wife, Theresa, AKA Tiska. He was the accountant of record for both the Wassermann-Sinclair kiddie porn empire and Sinclair's auto parts racket, through which the porn profits were laundered.

His defense, such as it was, was that he'd suspected that Sinclair and his friends were up to no good and had signed on as their accountant—at a most impressive salary—in order to spy on his sister's husband. Yeah, _right_. Morbidly obese Choate and Harvard grads were better criminal investigators than the cops every time, especially when almost two-thirds of their family income demonstrably came from those same criminal enterprises.

Charpentier had loathed George Van der Weese, the lead prosecutor, calling him a tinpot dictator in a cheap suit, referring snidely to his state-school J.D. degree and his lack of family worthy of mention. He'd chosen to ignore Aaron completely, as if the most junior member of the prosecution didn't even exist, until Hotch found that he could piss him off by pronouncing his name incorrectly. That had earned him a few minutes of Charpentier's furiously intense attention (_oooh, scary_) and had rattled him on at least two strategically critical occasions.

Aaron had spoken to Charpentier a grand total of three times before and during the trial, and while he couldn't guarantee the exact words, he could summarize those exchanges with some accuracy.

In the first, Charpentier—who clearly had overheard Marty Desmond jerking Aaron's chain as the least senior member of the team, calling him a _coffee guy in an Hermès tie_—had raised one eyebrow and suggested to Van der Weese that Hotchner bring them some refreshments. "Have your boy fetch us some coffee and perhaps we can discuss it," was the way Norton'd phrased it.

And God damn George Van der Weese, he'd turned to Hotch and said, "Could you do that, please, Aaron?"

Aaron had bowed slightly to the lead prosecutor and said, "Decaf, cream, one sugar, sir?" And when Van der Weese nodded, he'd added, "And what will your elephant be having?"

And God _bless_ Van der Weese, he'd turned to Charpentier and said, "What would you like, Mr. Charpentier?"

OK, Aaron had been childish. Big fucking deal. It had been rude and unprofessional, but it certainly hadn't been indicative of a conspiracy to convict an innocent man. And it didn't call for imprisoning and tormenting Hotch seventeen years later. Not even for one day, let alone 78 of them. Not even for an _hour_.

The second exchange between them had been longer, more detailed, and in open court. Low-man-on-the-totem-pole Hotchner had been tasked with presenting some documents to the man he referred to as _Mr. Carpenter_, and when repeatedly corrected, as _Mr._ _Char-pen-teer_. Neither side had a beef with the docs; it was just dotting I's and crossing T's. But every time Aaron mispronounced the defendant's name, Norton's complexion had shaded a little closer to purple. Cyn Allgood had later referred admiringly to his performance as "Aaron vs. Moby Grape."

Childish, sure. Actionable? Of course not. Charpentier had even admitted, on at least five occasions since he'd abducted Hotch, that his captivity had nothing to do with how poorly he pronounced Norton's name.

Third exchange, open court, under oath. Charpentier—who'd been advised by his attorney that it wasn't in his interests to testify, but who obviously thought that as a clearly superior mind, he knew better than any mere mortal lawyer what was best for him—was holding up well under cross-examination and Van der Weese decided to change it up a little bit, so Ben Evers had faked a coughing fit and Aaron had taken over for a few questions. Nothing dramatic, not even particularly significant—just a simple (and, eh, a little bit snarky) review of his previous testimony. ("Mr. Char-pen-teer, you got your law enforcement training from where? Choate? Harvard? Summer reruns of _Law and Order?"_)

That was it, the sum total of his interactions with Norton Charpentier in 1993.

OK, so maybe—just maybe—Charpentier'd decided on his own that there was something fishy going on with Sinclair's and Wassermann's businesses. Nevertheless, he'd never explained in court exactly where these suspicions had come from, which made his claim of suspicion, well, _suspicious_.

Hotchner shook the crumbs out of the little plastic sandwich bag and stored it tidily in the box under his bed. He opened a fresh bottle of water and gazed up at his picture gallery, the one that had eventually replaced the "Scenes from Warden's Life" crap that had been his original wall decorations. Nortie had even printed out on photo-grade paper the images his family and team had sent him. Aaron attached them to the metal walls with some of the dozens of fridge magnets he'd been given.

Yesterday, the same day that Warden'd got all pissy—and informed him that he'd shared Aaron's shame with his family—he'd also included four new 5x7 pictures, clearly sent in response to his most recent letter.

_Letter. _

He'd addressed the letter himself. It had gone to Garcia, not Jessica. Had Warden addressed another, separate envelope with the file? If so—possibly his fingerprints? Norton Charpentier might be "dead," but Aaron was willing to bet his fingerprints and DNA were still out there in a half-dozen databases.

Might Warden have lied? Aaron liked that possibility; the idea of his sister-in-law and his son having video of his subjection cut him deeply. Nevertheless, he thought the little guy was probably being straight with him. He'd been entirely too self-satisfied at Aaron's distress.

So—if he sent a separate letter, it had probably been with the same tear-and-stick flap as the envelopes Aaron addressed. So, no DNA. But some interesting flags would be raised when the late Norton Charpentier's fingerprints showed up. _If_ they showed up.

And until something happened, there was no use wasting energy speculating. Hoping.

He turned hungry eyes back toward his new pictures:

First: His mother and Haley's mother, Jessica, Sean, and Jack, sitting in front of a blank wall that he recognized as one in Jessica's house. Mrs. Brooks wore a dramatic orchid corsage, so that had probably been taken on Saturday, July 24, which had been her—_it would be, would be, jeez, she's seventy now_. _Nice of Mom to pry herself loose from her boyfriend and join in the festivities. Wonder whether she's figured out yet that Sean's gay. Hell, I wonder if _Sean's_ figured it out._

Second: Sean, Jack, and Spencer Reid, mugging in front of a blue sheet, all three wearing huge floppy sequined bow-ties and plastic imitation straw-boater-type hats advertising an ice show.

Third: A formal studio portrait of his mother and her—_you know, you're forty-four, you're a big boy, your dad's been dead for twenty-seven years, he's not her boyfriend, goddammit, he's her lover. And she's a mature woman, he's a nice guy, so just leave it, Slick. _

Fourth, and possibly most mind-boggling: An amazing action shot at some water park or theme park or something, a little round boat emerging from under an ornamental waterfall with a laughing, water-soaked Jack, with JJ, Will—and Erin Strauss. He was shocked to find that his gaze kept moving to JJ's and Erin's nipples, clearly visible through their wet tube tops.

_Damn, it's been a long time…._

**~ o ~**

"We have to talk," Emily Prentiss said on Monday morning, dropping into a chair across from Rossi's in the otherwise deserted break room.

He smiled over at her and dusted away the crumbs from his crescent roll. "What's up?"

She shook her head. "I know way more than I ever wanted to know about Aaron Hotchner," she confided. "If—I mean, _when_ he gets back, it's gonna be difficult."

Rossi regarded her sadly. "What, that he isn't perfect? That he's a human being, with needs and wants, one who makes mistakes and picks himself up and keeps going?"

She thought about that for a long moment. "That's part of it. Let me rephrase what I was saying. It's—OK, look, JJ and I got silly over Long Island iced tea last year and worked out what the theme songs were for everybody in the BAU, and we agreed that Hotch was 'Mr. Roboto.' Not quite human. And I can handle this—the whole Warden thing—as long as I can keep him at arm's length, Mr. Roboto, icy and focused and just—just inhumanly tough and professional. But the minute I start thinking—"

"Whoa, whoa, Em, after _last year_? After the _Reaper_ carved him up? After _Haley_ was killed? You can still think of him as some kind of stoic—"

"I _have_ to, Dave! Otherwise, I'm like, oh, my God, we have to get him out of there—"

Maddeningly unruffled, Rossi sipped his coffee. "Well, we do, Em. And we will. I know him better than you do—he's even more, to use your term, 'human.' I've seen him at his lowest, Em."

"No, you don't, Dave, you don't understand—"

No longer unruffled, Rossi slammed down his coffee cup. "Don't tell me what I do or don't understand, Emily," he said, his voice low but angry. "I poured him into a cab more than once when he drank himself into oblivion after Gideon had humiliated him in front of some class or other just to make a point and to make sure he never forgot who was in charge. I cleaned up after him the morning he stopped at my place to puke because he'd spent the night servicing your mother and he hated himself—"

"Stop," she gasped, horrified. "Enough, enough. You win."

The senior profiler resumed drinking his coffee. "So, I can't wait," he said at last. "What's my theme song?"

Relieved that the tension had dissipated, she leaned forward sweetly. "'Oh, Lord, It's Hard to Be Humble.'"

Dave finished his coffee and grinned. "Jesus. Am I busted, or what?"

"Hey," Anderson said, leaning into the break room with one hand wrapped around the door jamb. "Morgan wants everyone in conference, now. A break on Guffey."

"Check this out," Penelope Garcia announced a few minutes later, and she clicked her remote. "Somebody in Fort Collins, Colorado, used Claymore Guffey's debit card at 3:44 this morning. He withdrew three hundred dollars." An image of a man at an ATM machine appeared on the screen. He was lean and wiry—that much was evident because he wore a Marlins muscle tee and denim cutoffs. He was also bashful, because he wore a full-head gorilla mask.

She glared at the Team. "No cracks about monkey business, please. Everyone in IT has been there and done that already."

The view shifted. "Also observe, whoever Gorilla Boy is, he's five-eleven, about one-seventy; in short, he's built just like Guff. Now, hold your _oohs_ and _aahs_ of surprise until the big finish, please."

The last shot came from another security camera on a different street. It showed a slender man peeling an inexpensive gorilla mask off his head. Skin and hair tones were skewed in the night vision of the surveillance video, but the face was that of Claymore Guffey, the allegedly kidnapped agent from Oklahoma City, minus his beard. He looked haggard and defeated.

"Aw, captivity doesn't seem to agree with him," Anderson drawled.

Rossi made an audible sound of disgust. "How did this jagoff ever get into the Bureau? Not to insult morons in general, but did we have some EEOC anti-discrimination thing where we had to hire more morons?"

"Undercover's harder than it looks," said Morgan. "Folks don't realize it, they don't plan, they don't have a support system—and you _can't_ _do it alone_ for very long unless you're prepared to stay way under the radar."

A thrill coursed through Emily's entire body. "We're going to Colorado," she groaned, "oh, pretty please, Morgan, tell me we're going to Colorado. I want to nail this time- and energy-sucking loser _so bad_."

"Technically, Office of Professional Responsibility wants his ass worse than anyone," Morgan replied with a huge grin, "and the OKC field office wants a piece of him, too. His ex-wife still seems to think he's a victim, but she's been a little quieter lately. Considering how far out on the line she was putting her butt with the media, she may be lined up to take a nibble, too, before long." The huge grin got even wider. "But OPR has assured us that as soon as they're sure he's dug in there, he isn't going anywhere immediately, we're welcome to join the party, with a pair of agents physically to be part of the actual take-down."

"You'll have to hold a raffle for that one, Derek," JJ said, laughing. "And I'll tell you now, I'm investing my whole paycheck in tickets."

Reid cleared his throat. "I'll, uh, pass on my usual lectures about the statistics of raffles, and just say that I'm prepared to complete one lucky agent's paperwork for the entire month of September if that agent trades me his or her winning ticket." He gave his little kitten grin. "Unless I win, of course."

**~ o ~**

Norton Charpentier had rarely been so grateful to escape the heat and humidity.

It was Wednesday, August 4th. The temp and humidity had to be 98 by 98, and it just didn't get that way in the mountains much. The horses were cranky. Bren and Ted were starting to make noises again (they did around this time every year) about investing in air conditioning. He lugged the cartons off the elevator and into the sweet coolness of the bunker, setting them down beside the cell. He caught his breath before calling, "Are you awake?"

"Yeah," came the reply from behind the metal wall. Subdued, almost bored.

He unlatched the window and slid it open. The lawyer reclined on his right side on his cot, legal pad in front of him and a ballpoint in his left hand. He looked up at Norton with an odd expression—not quite blank, not quite sullen—and continued with whatever he was writing.

"What's your name?"

Hotchner studied him for a few seconds, apparently calculating how likely it was that Norton would get all pissy about disrespect—and apparently deciding the answer was pretty damned likely and pretty damned pissy—because he set the pen down carefully.

He raised his eyes to the window and said, coldly and distinctly, "Prisoner, sir."

"And mine?"

He hadn't moved an unnecessary muscle and his face revealed nothing. "Warden, sir."

"Your statements."

It was a good thing that Charpentier hadn't pinned any hopes on Hotchner learning to recite his statements with meaning unless he was required to do so. Still motionless on his cot, he raised his gaze to the one sign still posted in the cell, the one above the window. His delivery when he began could best be described as wooden. However, as he moved into the second paragraph, his eyes flickered downward and connected with Norton's when he mentioned how his sentence was contingent on his good behavior, and how Warden had ensured that his treatment was humane and dignified. It was as though, whether he realized it or not, he was coming to terms with the only true control he had over his captivity: cooperation.

Charpentier tossed the exercise collar to him. The lawyer rose to a sitting position and set aside his pen and paper. Norton watched the little light on his remote go from red to amber as the collar leads connected.

"Hands."

Prisoner got up and approached the window. "Which way?" he asked.

"Front's fine." When the lawyer presented his hands, Charpentier cuffed them himself, and not particularly gently. Other than a fleeting grimace, there was no reaction from his captive. He probably figured—correctly—that they'd be removed soon so he could go to the exercise cage, so there was no point in fussing over their tightness.

"I have something big for you today," he told Hotchner. A tiny spark of something—fear?—shone in the man's eyes briefly, but then the curtain came down again.

Charpentier unlocked the door, collected the two cartons, and brought them, one at a time, into the cell, setting them side by side on the cot. There was no clue as to what the contents were on the outsides of the boxes, which were from a New Jersey fish market. When he was done, he took the Enforcer from his pocket and came over to stand at the lawyer's right side.

"Recognize this?" he asked.

Prisoner swallowed visibly, but showed nothing else. "Yes," he said quietly.

Norton slid it up under his sweater and the shirt, against his skin, watching as the lawyer winced, as his hands clenched, bracing himself for a shock. "Do you remember promising me that you would never again destroy anything I give you?"

Clearly confused, Hotchner nodded, then whispered, "Yes, sir. And I haven't."

"I paid more than six thousand dollars for what's in those boxes," Norton informed him. "If you destroy it, or make it unusable in any way, I make you a solemn promise, the Enforcer will be the least of your worries." He nudged the man's side. "Do you understand me?"

Still frozen in apprehension, still waiting for the power to be turned on, his prisoner nodded slightly. "Yes, sir."

"That, Prisoner, is the complete transcripts of my trial"—the lawyer actually turned slightly, looking back at the boxes, then sighed and looked at Norton with perhaps a little bit more interest—"and I'll make you another solemn promise, Prisoner: If after you've reviewed the contents of those boxes, if you can tell me truthfully that you see no evidence of your guilt, of your complicity in railroading an innocent man, I promise that I'll let you go. I mean it; I'll bring you some clothes and I'll take you up to the surface and escort you to the nearest road and you can hitchhike wherever you want to go—a free man."

"Really," Hotchner said, but his tone suddenly dripped sarcasm. "With me knowing your name and the location of this—wherever the fuck we are. You'll just set me loose." All of them were statements, not questions. All of them carried the unspoken message, _Yeah, right_.

_Pretty ballsy for someone who has the contacts to a cattle prod jammed up against his ribs, _Norton thought, with some wonder_. _"Yes," he answered, keeping his own tone steady. "That's how confident I am that all of the evidence you need to convict yourself is in those boxes."

"Fine," Prisoner said with a sigh, and he returned to facing forward—and presumably trying to ignore the Enforcer against his side.

"Is this a good time to discuss your punishment for being rude to me?"

The lawyer bit his lip, barely breathing now. "You're the one with the power," he said quietly. "It's your decision, not mine."

"And you'll just go along with it." Which was no more a question than Prisoner's _yeah, right_ statements had been.

Hotchner didn't say a word, just stood there with his forehead against the wall just above the window.

"Are you going to answer?"

The lawyer took a long deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Sorry," he said finally. "Did you ask a question?"

Norton gave up. He withdrew the Enforcer and replaced it in his pocket. Then he ran the main line from the cell to the cage and attached the leash to Prisoner's collar. When he left the cell and unlocked the cuffs, the lawyer murmured his thanks and rubbed his wrists for a moment before heading to the cage and his exercise period.

**~ o ~**

_He brought me the trial transcripts._

He put on the canvas work gloves Warden had provided and attacked the rock face with the pickaxe for the space of at least eight songs. That meant twenty-five or so solid minutes of upper body exercise, but when he was done, he just stood there—panting, his chest heaving, awash with sweat—and thought it again.

_Trial transcripts. Holy fucking shit._

He mopped his brow with a forearm and yanked off the gloves, dropping them beside the cooler where Warden always left a few bottles of juice.

_He's so sure that I'll see guilt that he offers to set me free, no questions asked, if I don't see it myself. Which means that A, he's so delusional that he can't imagine me not seeing what he sees, and, B, he's sure the evidence is so overwhelming that I wouldn't dream of just lying and denying that I saw it. If I saw it._

_Aw, Christ. Where do we go with this?_

The juice was pineapple-orange today, three bottles of it, some brand he'd never heard of. All of them had been refrigerated. That was supposed to remind him of something, but he wasn't sure what.

He fell into the upholstered armchair, mopped his brow, his neck, with the gray sweater—he'd wash it out and switch to the navy one—and chugged down most of the bottle of juice in one long, thirsty series of gulps. He threw his head back, so grateful to look upward without being half-blinded by high-intensity lights. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel—by then solo artists, not a joined duo—sang about their little town, about _flying my bike past the gates of the factory…as I pledged allegiance to the wall. _He held the bottle with the last dregs of cold juice against his forehead, his cheeks, the back of his neck.

Jarring chords introduced Elvis Presley, singing Jailhouse Rock. Aaron chuckled at the irony of the song, given his own circumstances. Wondered whether Warden had considered that when he added it to the mix. Wondered whether ol' Nortie had recognized the homoerotic aspects of the song. Ordinarily, he'd say _yes_, because Charpentier missed so fucking little; he was a remarkably observant little dude. When it came to sexuality, though, Hotch had him pegged as a man heavily in denial about matters sensual. He recalled the time Warden had spazzed out about how there was no prison rape here and Aaron said he'd prefer to take his chances with a fair fight in the showers.

The _soap_, he recalled, his eyes flying open again. He had a plan for the _soap_ that he'd never put into action. Such a rare, specialized brand. One he'd never heard of before.

He looked around. Warden was still moving empty bottles and dirty bedding out of the cell, moving fresh resources and bedding into it.

_The soap. I have to send a message to do the soap thing._

The next time Warden emerged from the metal cube, Aaron called out to him. "Warden? Sir?"

Charpentier set down whatever he was carrying and walked over toward the exercise cage. "What's your problem?"

As he approached, Aaron took a deep breath and steeled himself for whatever might follow. "Warden, I respectfully request that you get on with however you were planning to punish me for my rudeness. I—I know it's your decision, but I think I'll go nuts worrying about what you're going to do to me." _Lots of I-statements in there, both inviting empathy and implying an inferior posture._ "I'll understand if you, if you want to—" _Spit it out, Slick!_ "—if you want to embarrass me again. Whatever you want me to say or do or be, whatever you want to do to me, send it to Jess or whatever. But put me out of my misery, Warden."

Charpentier stopped only a few feet from the bars and looked at him oddly. "Jess?" he said.

"You said—you said you sent video to my sister-in-law—"

Norton grimaced. "I'm sorry, Prisoner. I seem to have misspoken myself. The flash drive was included in your letter, so it went to Penelope Garcia. I'm sure that it's made its way to your sister-in-law by now, but I didn't send it directly to her."

_OK, bad news, it wasn't a separate envelope, but good news, it went to Garcia, and…._

Which meant that the whole Team had seen him cringing in front of Warden.

_Man up, Slick. If anyone in the world knows what that did and didn't mean, it's the Team. Better news still, everything goes to Garcia. So the soap thing could work._

Norton gestured vaguely back toward the cell. "There's a lot left to do," he said. "We can discuss this when I'm through. And you still have to do your chin-up things, right?"

Hotchner nodded. "Yes, sir. Thank you."


	33. Who's Prepared to Pay the Price

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

A/N 2: Lyrics to "Love for Sale" copyright 1930 by Cole Porter.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-Three**

**Who's Prepared to Pay the Price**

After Warden returned to whatever the hell he was doing in Aaron's cell, Hotch went back to slumping in the armchair. He was starting to feel a bit chilly, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. He was accustomed to lower temperatures now.

Something low, very slow, and bluesy was on the boombox. It wasn't anything he could recall hearing before—a female vocalist who possibly had problems pronouncing her Rs.

_When the only sound in the empty street  
>Is the heavy tread of the heavy feet<br>That belong to a lonesome cop,  
>I open shop. <em>

Weird imagery, he decided. He twisted the cap off a second bottle of juice.

_When the moon so long has been gazing down  
>On the wayward ways of this wayward town<br>That her smile becomes a smirk  
>I go to work.<em>

A prostitute, he realized. Interesting that there were pop tunes about hookers now, especially ones with lyrics even Haley would have called literate.

_Love for sale.  
>Appetizing young love for sale…<br>Love that's fresh and still unspoiled  
>Love that's only slightly soiled<br>Love for sale_

A terrifying song, the voice broken, weary, but powerful in her knowledge. He leaned way back, let the texture overwhelm him, let the faces of a thousand hookers—dead, broken, or arrested—drift through his memory, girls and women with limited options, doing the best they could with the hand they'd been dealt by circumstance. He wondered where that song had been all his life.

_W__ho will buy?  
>Who would like to sample my supply?<br>Who's prepared to pay the price  
>For a trip to paradise?<br>Love for sale!_

"Do you like that one?" Warden's voice asked. When he nodded and made a positive noise, Charpentier added, "It's from the soundtrack of _De-Lovely_."

Which meant nothing to Hotchner, who hadn't had time to see anything that hadn't come out of Pixar Studios since Jack arrived, and barely recalled much of what he'd seen before that. Movies were more Haley's thing than his. He was a TV kind of guy, relaxed, uncomplicated.

"It was one of George Van der Weese's favorite movies," Charpentier continued—and _that _caused his eyes to fly wide open. "And that was his favorite song from that movie. And it was my favorite scene, because they did the whole thing in one long shot. Didn't care much for the movie, tell you the truth, but that scene, well, I was thrilled when the DVD came out and they had a little featurette on it."

"You talked about movies with him?" He'd never had any indication that the two men had connected on any level other than the case before them.

"Briefly," Charpentier said. "He only lived for two hours."

Hotchner stared for a long moment at the smaller man standing a few feet from the bars, his hands in the pockets of his khakis. _"What?_"

"Or thereabouts," Norton said. His voice was soft and regretful. "I planned it so carefully—far more carefully than your own acquisition. Too carefully. I underestimated the degree to which multiple contingencies add robustness to a plan of action."

"Van der Weese's dead?" Aaron gasped in horror. "You took him, too? When? How? Why?"

"He took responsibility for my bad-faith prosecution," said Warden. "At the hearings that gave me back my innocence. And he was never even admonished for it. Can you imagine? Nearly five years of my life, my wife and daughter dead, and they barely even waggled their fingers at him and said _tut-tut, poor form, old sport_."

Hotchner forced himself to sound calm, concerned. "Want to talk about it?"

Charpentier gave a weak smile. "Yes, you _would_ say that, wouldn't you? Drawing out the UNSUB, I think you call it."

There was no sense in denying it, so he nodded.

"We were in his car," Warden said, a faraway look in his eye. "He thought my car had broken down; he was just giving me a lift to the service station. I didn't know he had a bad heart. He hadn't told anyone, not even his daughter. He was thoroughly terrified, hyperventilating and sweating, though I hadn't touched him with the Enforcer. I'd only threatened him." He nodded toward Aaron. "I had the opposite problem with you. I underestimated how much, and how severely, I would have to hurt you just to get you to bend a little bit. You're a proud man."

Hotchner found himself wishing Warden had said _stubborn_ rather than _proud_, then recognized it as yet more evidence of his pride. "Busted," he said finally, without apology. You didn't survive in the courtroom or at the Bureau without confidence and a healthy ego.

"So I talked to him about movies and music, about what he enjoyed. I was trying to set him at ease. And gradually he told me that he'd been covering for a more junior member of his staff, one who didn't deserve to have an impressive career torpedoed by an early error. He said that it was a 'paradox of the court when it comes to self-correction,' his exact words, that they tended to come down harder on youthful attorneys, who conceivably had made an innocent error, than they did on seasoned ones who ought to have known better by then. He said that once it became evident to him that grave and potentially criminal culpability was involved, he chose to take the blame himself rather than see a promising young man punished more drastically.

"Which was all I needed," Warden finished with another of his weak, sad little smiles. "There were two young lawyers on his team, but only one was a young _man_. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the judge's heart seized. I'd actually decided to let him go, but it wasn't in the cards. When I wasn't able to revive him, I got out, pushed his car over the side of the hill, and walked a few miles to an intersection where I could thumb a ride back to where I'd parked my own car."

"Wait, you did CPR on him? An autopsy would've picked up on that."

"You'd think, wouldn't you? On _CSI_, on all those TV procedurals, it would have. I don't think I cracked his ribs or sternum, but even if I did, apparently it was consistent with the damage from the crash. And post-mortem is post-mortem is post-mortem, as Gertrude Stein might have said."

So George Van der Weese—who had a fine legal mind—had seen him as criminally culpable? A different kind of perspiration broke out along his forehead and dripped down his sides.

_Christ, then why can't I remember it? I've reviewed every word I ever said to this guy—and if I were criminally liable, you'd better fucking believe I'd remember it!_

"Maybe he just shifted the blame to me to deflect you from himself," Hotch suggested. "I've spent hours going over everything we said to each other—and it wasn't much. OK, I was rude, childish, a jackass, but I didn't do anything illegal. To be honest, I can't imagine _George_ doing anything illegal, either, though—so I don't know what to make of your claims."

Charpentier sat down in the armchair that faced Hotchner's. "I've found it, though," he said. "And so did my attorneys. It's all right there in the transcripts. It's so self-evident that I have no idea how Judge Van der Weese managed to shuck-and-jive them into letting him take the blame."

His attorneys? Then there was somebody else out there, maybe a couple somebodies, who knew that Norton Charpentier held Aaron Hotchner responsible for his conviction. Had they come forward? If not, why not?

Unless they, too, thought Nortie had died in Alaska, in—what year did he say? In '98?

_Christ, this just gets more complicated, doesn't it?_

**~ o ~**

_Transcripts._

A little later, back in his cell, Hotch stared at the two boxes that Warden, ever hyper-organized, Warden had marked "#1" and "#2" in permanent marker on their lids. The prospect of reliving the trial in mind-numbing detail didn't arouse much in the way of excitement in his breast, but his life pretty much depended on it. Amazing what a motivator that could be.

_Do I even want to look at this crap?_

He removed the box lids and found himself immediately depressed and intimidated by the sheer volume of material. Along with several volumes of trial transcripts, there were stacks and stacks of depositions, interview transcripts, and pleadings.

What was the most efficient way to manage these materials, he wondered. Should he start by separating out only those records where he himself had been personally involved, or would he risk missing something potentially crucial by doing so?

Finally he decided to read everything in strictly chronological order, paying special attention whenever his own name cropped up in print.

He armed himself with several legal pads, ballpoints in three colors, a yellow high-lighter, his last three Slim-Jims, and some off-brand pineapple-mango-peach drink that tasted better than he'd had any reason to expect. Might as well enjoy it, he thought grimly.

And there it was, the face sheet:

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff,

v.

CARLOS WASSERMANN,

GERALD SINCLAIR,

SONNY KINGMAN,

ANTHONY LAMOTTA,

EUGENE GETZ,

MYRON ALBERTS,

ROY SANDERS,

DELBERT RODRIGUEZ,

EGON MISARA,

EARL THOMPSON,

JOHN DELANEY JR.,

STEPHEN MOONEY,

ALBERT HALL,

AND

NORTON CHARPENTIER,

Defendants.

DOCKET NO. DC-93-107865-2

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

VOLUME 65, PAGES 0001 - 1147

MARCH 22, 1993

APPEARANCES:

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

CRIMINAL DIVISION

GEORGE VAN DER WEESE, ESQUIRE FOR PLAINTIFF,

MARTIN DESMOND, ESQUIRE

BENJAMIN EVERS, ESQUIRE

CYNTHIA ALLGOOD, ESQUIRE

AARON HOTCHNER, ESQUIRE

Below the trial transcript were two smaller documents—a slim sheaf of pre-trial motions and a two-inch loose-leaf binder containing discovery filings. Setting aside the former, Hotch opened the binder and glanced over its table of contents. Probably two dozen witnesses had been deposed by the prosecution, and he realized he had conducted well over half of them. There were far fewer defense depositions.

He took a few minutes to sit there with his eyes closed, making an effort to recall each of the participants in that trial.

There was no mention of the judge on the face sheet. His Honor Frederick Payne Pearson had presided over the whole mess. A snarky, balding man with a genius at herding attorneys, Pearson was universally adored by jurors and respected by both defense and prosecution. He made it all look so easy that occasionally some poor fool figured that it meant the judge was soft. It wasn't an error the fool would ever repeat.

With a sigh, he began to sort through the boxes, rearranging their contents by date instead of by type of document. Finally he picked up the earliest volume and settled as comfortably as he could in his chair for what he knew would be a long, grueling session of study and note-taking.

A couple of hours later, he set aside the third binder and stood, stretching. It was time for a bathroom break and a few pushups to keep his mind sharp. _God, for a Starbuck's about now. _

_Jesus._

After his break, to put a different perspective on things, he took every single volume out of the boxes, a complete waste of paper, laid out in the least effective use of space imaginable, and laid them all out across his cot. For the first time in months, part of him wanted to reach for his cell phone, to take a picture of that monument to futility. He even patted his pockets for an instant—that was how far into his past the sight of court transcripts had sent him.

But he was _here_, damn it. He was in his little metal world at the mercy of a malcontent who'd ended the life of a sweet old guy, a romantic who'd never remarried after leukemia took his bride of just six years, the man who doted on his daughter, spoiled his cocker spaniels silly, who loved classic jazz records, white russians, and '60s folk rock, and sometimes relieved office tensions on his baritone sax.

He sat down so hard on his straight-back chair that his right foot knocked over one of the fish market boxes.

_What will they say of me when I die? The grouchy old guy who let his wife die, who wasn't there nearly enough for his son, who had no room in his life for pets or collections and hadn't touched the piano since his mother took pity on him and stopped the lessons he'd loathed— who had no hobbies, no interests, who lived for the job, who relieved his tensions by drinking bourbon, any fucking bourbon, while watching Animal Planet—with the sound off. _

He sighed, leaned over, righted the lined cardboard box he'd tipped over. Nothing in there but a few tiny scattered disks of paper as if someone had used a hole punch, or stored something recently punched, perhaps. Dust. A paper clip.

He sat upright again. Surveyed the tidy stacks of testimony.

_Paper clip._

A shock of excitement shot through him; his mouth dry, he glanced nervously around the room. How had Warden obtained video of him? Was there a hidden camera in here? If there was, it had to be behind him. More likely, Warden'd been holding up a phone or a camera and he'd been so intent on not showing how much he hated kneeling before his captor that he'd missed it completely. _Some sharp-eyed agent, Hotchner._

Just in case there really was a camera behind him, he kept his moves smooth and calm, relaxed. He wasn't much of an actor, but he'd learned how to hide his emotions in courtrooms and interrogation rooms. He picked up the empty box and began re-stacking the transcripts in its interior, turning them so they fit neatly. In the process, his fingers closed around the bit of wire. He wanted to hyperventilate. He wanted to whoop and holler. He wanted to fall on the bed and close his eyes and plan for his freedom.

Because one tense evening as he and Spencer Reid sat in a Bureau vehicle, keeping an eye on the home of a potential UNSUB, in order to halt the young man's efforts to explain the whole Doctor Who thing and why he should give a shit about it, he had allowed the kid—whose twin backgrounds in mechanical engineering and sleight of hand perfectly suited him to this expertise—to teach him how to pick a set of handcuffs with a paper clip.

And Aaron Hotchner might be an old grouch with a barely adequate range of interests, but he rarely forgot anything that might conceivably be useful.

_I can get out of here._

With ridiculously unsteady hands—and keeping a sharp ear out for the telltale rattle of the elevator—he straightened it out a little and twirled it between his fingers. He recalled how Hannibal Lecter (_why the hell do I keep identifying with him?_) had secreted the piece of ballpoint pen in his rectum. No. Given his situation, he would have to secrete it somewhere accessible from the front. He found himself wishing for just an instant that he had been trained as a spy, that he had a hollowed tooth or something he could hide it in. (_Oh, like I could fit a paper clip into a tooth._)

He needed to partially straighten out the clip, but leave the inner bend intact…just squeeze it inward a bit to make it fit inside the tiny opening on the cuffs. God knows he'd seen enough handcuff keys, all he had to do was replicate the shape and it should do the trick. But the straightened part…. He smiled suddenly. He could probably fit it in his mouth, pressed down alongside his gum. It wouldn't show from the outside, he could still speak if required, but a push of his tongue would force it out when he needed it. The only problem would be if Warden wanted to inspect the inside of his mouth while still outside the cell, but he'd never done that before—that always happened inside the cell, and only when he was cuffed facing inward. Aaron had no reason to expect he would do so in the future.

So now all there was to it was to tuck it into the little breast pocket of his scrubs so when he did hear the elevator, he could pop it into his mouth. And wait. And hope that he picked the right moment, the right circumstances. If he were caught, if he screwed up, he had no doubt that the consequences would be at the very least, dreadful, and potentially fatal.

_OK. Second thoughts. Do I really want to risk this? Third thoughts. Do I dare NOT risk this?_

_Answer: I have to. I may never have another chance._

OK, then, if he was going to do this, he would have to practice. He'd have to get an idea of how difficult it would be to get the damn thing from his mouth into his hand and into position. At the most, he would have fifteen seconds—and at worst, ten, while Warden unlocked the door. Luckily he'd become sensitized to the faint hum of the electronic locks. He would be able to count them. With luck, Warden'd be focused on them himself and would dismiss any clicks he heard from the window and the rod as the cuffs jangling against the wall.

He looked around the cell. What could he use to practice on? Nothing was really at the right height, and he couldn't get his hands behind the red bar with the door closed, so he finally decided on the frame of his cot. He'd use the post of the cot as though it were the red bar. He straightened out the clip, pinched the other end tightly together, and popped it into his mouth, with the "tail" of the clip to the back of his mouth. As he'd hoped, it fit snugly against his gum. He walked over to the mirror, examined his face for any sign of the clip's presence, and saw nothing at all. So far, so good!

Going over to the cot, he knelt down beside it and put his hands around the nearest post of the cot's frame, lacing his fingers together and keeping his wrists about the same distance apart as they were with the cuffs on. It wasn't really as high as he would've liked, but it was all he had. Leaning forward and slightly down as he always did when Warden cuffed him, he pretended his captor had just begun to open the first lock.

In all of his—he consulted the clock: it was still Wednesday, the fourth of August, his 82nd day of captivity—in all of this time, through all the abuse, the solitude, the cold and the hunger, the false hopes, he had never felt quite this jazzed, this positive.

Or this utterly terrified.

Sort of like the hooker challenged in the song that poor old George Van der Weese had liked so much, was he prepared to pay the price for his shot at paradise?

In the end, he decided that there was no possible answer but, _Yeah. Bring it on._


	34. Takedown

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-Four**

**Takedown**

The first meeting with the expanded team in Denver went remarkably well. Morgan was impressed with both the professionalism and the intensity of the team from the Office of Professional Responsibility—whom he tended, unfairly, to dismiss as "internal affairs" type desk jockeys—and the controlled anger of the Oklahoma City field office representatives. Then there were their hosts, the Denver field office; they'd have a hand in this operation, too, since it would go down in their territory. All told, a total of twenty-three agents gathered in the Denver situation room after lunch on Friday, August 6, 2010.

Everybody wanted a piece of Claymore Guffey. Denver wanted him because he'd chosen their territory as a place he thought he could successfully hide out in. OPR wanted him because he was your basic embarrassment to the Bureau. OKC wanted him because they'd served with him, supported him, nurtured him, and he'd gone and abused their trust. The BAU wanted him because every moment and every nickel spent thinking that he'd been taken by Warden had been time and money stolen from their efforts to locate and rescue Aaron Hotchner.

Eight people, two agents from each team, would be tasked with the actual takedown when the time came. OPR, technically running the operation, would contribute the team leader, Dan Preston, and Walt Obregon. Denver would supply Doug Saxon and Laurel Fike. OKC's Abigail Ray and Jackson Szymanski and the BAU's Morgan and Prentiss would round out the team.

"We have one major concern," Spencer Reid said when it was the BAU's turn to present its ideas. "Even though Guffey has yet to kill anyone that we know of, his moves are becoming more desperate, less covert. In some ways, he's beginning to profile like a spree killer. And that means—" he looked around the room solemnly "—that he's moving toward suicide by cop. And given his background, his need to shine, to be the best at whatever he is, his end strategy will be to take as many of us with him as he possibly can. He'll sacrifice a clean end for himself if it means he can rack up a few kills. If he can't be the best agent the Bureau ever had, then he'll be the worst, the deadliest."

Only three or four years previously, there would have been murmurs of outrage from those who were not fully conversant with profiling. These days, even civilians understood some of the basics of profiling, so the only heads to shake were ones still bitter because they had at some point trusted Guffey.

"We want to take him alive," said Abby Ray, a leggy blonde who'd been with OKC for six years but from some angles still looked like a coed. "We know that may not be an option. We know that if we don't have that choice, it'll be Guff's decision, not ours. But—apart from FBI policy, we really, really want this douche to have to stand there and look us in the eye and answer for his douchery."

"You're not alone in that," said official team leader Dan Preston. "Every one of us wants him to stand trial for what he's done."

"Due respect, sir," Abby Ray said, "but I wasn't done. End of story, if someone takes him out, damn it, I want to be the one. Son of a bitch is my daughter's godfather."

"Hell, you aren't alone in that one either," Preston grumbled, "although not everyone would admit it. Bottom line, though, as team and operations leader, I'm gonna be explicit here, I'm unleashing a world of hurt on whoever nails him unless and until it's established that it was an operational necessity. So if you have a personal problem with him, I can reassign you to a less hands-on—"

Ray threw up her hands. "Not a problem," she said. "Honestly. I'd rather look him in the eye alive than shoot him. And I think if it comes to that he'll off himself before he'll let us do it." She looked at Reid, standing there with his hands in his pockets.

"Likely," he said, nodding sadly.

**~ o ~**

His first opportunity turned out to be no opportunity at all. He heard the rattle and whine, heard Warden pushing his little hand truck off the elevator. He fumbled the paperclip out of his pocket and tucked it alongside his gum, with his pulses racing and a fine sheen of nerves dampening his forehead. His eyes darted to the clock.

_Sunday, August 8th, my 86th day in this hole. Is this the end of my "term"? Or the end of my life?_

When the window shot open, it was all he could do to stay on the cot so that there was no difference between that day and any other. He wanted to pop right up and stick his hands out on either side of the rod.

_I'm so ready for this!_

"Put your chair in position," Warden barked.

Shit. How could he have known? He moved the chair into the tiny depressions in the floor.

"Get some cord," Warden directed. "You know what to do."

"What's wrong?" Aaron asked, keeping his voice low, calm, but wondering, like every guilty man does, whether he'd given himself away.

"Just tie your ankles to the front legs. You know the rules."

He gathered a few loops of plastic cord and complied with the command, all the time gently nudging the paperclip with the side of his tongue. _God, if he decides to search my mouth right now, it's all over. _

"Heads up, here come the cuffs," Warden said.

Even though Nortie pitched them through the window in an easy arc, Hotchner almost missed them. "In front, or behind?" he asked. He wondered whether his voice sounded as tense to his captor as it did to him.

"Front's fine," Charpentier said, his own voice casual.

_Haircut,_ Aaron realized, relief washing over him. _Always a haircut early in the month, but last time he was distracted by the transcripts._

He sat meekly in the cuffs as Warden arranged the canvas and Velcro band around his upper body. Norton wrapped the baby blanket about Aaron's head and shoulders, and the barbering implements came out.

"So," Norton said, as the comb made its first pass through Aaron's coarse, thick hair. "Have you spent much time looking at the transcripts yet?"

_No. It's immaterial, because as soon as I have a chance, I'm either out of here or dead._

"I've started looking at the documentation," he temporized. "Trying to get a picture again of who all the players were."

_Snip. Snip._

"That's a good place to start," Charpentier said.

_Hell, might as well ask the question he refused to answer on the stand._

"I always wondered why you wouldn't tell us what made you suspect there was something fishy with Wassermann," Aaron said, keeping his voice light and conversational.

"I couldn't do it, not there in court in front of everyone," Charpentier replied. "Not going on the public record. To you, though—I can be frank."

"Why? What can you tell me now that you couldn't say in open court?"

_Snip. Snip._

"I never trusted Jerry Sinclair. He was a sleaze from the word go, and you could tell from the way he looked at Missy, that's Tiska's little girl, that something was up with him. And after Tiska married him Missy started hiding in her room. She started—having accidents. Wetting herself. He even looked funny at Ellie, but it was only my perception, you understand? You can't just say something like that without proof. That's a serious charge, you can ruin a life with it."

"I understand," Aaron said, and he meant it.

"By the time we got to court I was as sure as I could be that he'd molested Missy, but Tiska didn't see it, and I wasn't about to share something that—that invasive of my niece's privacy in open court. Especially since when I raised it to Tiska, she was completely in denial. I think that's why she turned on me; because I challenged her fantasy of a perfect marriage to the perfect guy. Because she might have some responsibility herself, for not listening to me. My sister isn't used to being wrong," he added in a sad tone.

"Then why didn't you go to the police?" Aaron asked, exasperated.

"That's easy for you to say, because it isn't your family involved. I had to be sure before I went to the authorities—but by the time I was starting to get some hard evidence, the raid happened, and there I was, with a big double handful of evidence in my hands."

"You know," Hotchner said slowly, carefully, "if you'd said in court what you've said to me, the odds of acquittal might have been better."

"Right. Say in open court that I think my niece has been molested? Destroy her life and her mom's for the whole world to hear? Just to get myself off?"

_Snip. Snip._

"But it would have been so fucking easy—"

_Oh, holy shit, what if he really _was_ innocent?_

A firm hand grasped him by the hair. "Do me a favor and keep your head still, Prisoner."

He sighed. "Yes, sir."

**~ o ~**

It would take a lot of time and distance before Morgan would be sure exactly when and where the takedown of Claymore Guffey went sour.

The first complication had been that he was not, in fact, alone.

Guffey'd been confirmed to be squatting in a vacant house on a rural road with a woman and a younger man. They'd been identified as his girlfriend from Oklahoma City, Iola Davis, and her 19-year-old son Brink, who was AWOL from Army basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. None of them had been seen with weapons. Brink had split from the reception battalion; he'd never even been issued a weapon.

After a lot of discussion, they'd divided the teams so a rep from each of the four teams would be on each. Dan Preston, overall team leader, would enter from the front, assisted by Doug Saxon, Emily Prentiss, Jack Szymanski, and four Denver SWAT guys.

Morgan led the second team through the back entrance, with Walt Obregon, Laurel Fike, Abby Ray, and five guys from Denver SWAT.

There was a chopper overhead, and two other teams provided backup and communications in two SUVs. JJ was in one SUV; Anderson and Rossi were in the other. Reid remained back at HQ, watching a graphic from the chopper.

SUV Number One pulled into the driveway and ordered Guffey and the Davises out of the house over its PA system, but there was no reaction from the little house. Thermal imaging confirmed that all three people were in the house and upright, so alive and awake.

When there was no response after a second warning, Preston gave the go-ahead and both teams entered simultaneously.

And simultaneously with that, SUV Number One shuddered and rocked and blew apart. Pieces of shrapnel hit the front entry team. Prentiss and Preston stayed on task in spite of withering fire from the Davises. They were only armed with .22 rifles, but they were semi-automatic Marlins and even small-caliber weapons can do a lot of damage. Morgan and the second team broke in through the back, and Guffey rolled a pair of grenades at them.

There was a lot of confusion and noise and craziness, and when—literally—the smoke cleared, it was anybody's guess whose rounds had killed Claymore Guffey and Iola Davis. Brink Davis's end was clearer; he'd hesitated too long before lobbing the last of their three fragmentation grenades.

Doug Saxon from the Denver office was dead; shrapnel from SUV One had removed the top of his head. Jennifer Jareau of the BAU and Monty Welles from OPR had been airlifted back to Fort Collins with fractures and internal injuries. JJ would be all right, given recovery time; Welles might lose the sight in one eye. Abigail Ray, a mother of two, had lost a leg, as had one of the SWAT guys. Derek Morgan and Laurel Fike were both treated and released, but Walter Obregon of OPR had taken the brunt of a frag grenade. He wasn't expected to live.

Iola Davis, they learned from her fingerprints, was the ex-wife of a domestic terrorist and was herself skilled with explosives. It was she who had buried the bomb in the driveway.

For three hours, David Rossi was technically in charge, and he paced the halls of the hospital _dying_ to kill someone, except everyone who needed killing was already dead.

**~ o ~**

He was a seabird, alabaster wings outstretched, swooping in graceful circles above a sparkling ocean, the wind rushing by as he gazed down at the vastness below. Oh God, the feeling of complete and absolute bliss, the knowledge he was finally free to soar wherever the current carried him or his heart desired to go….

_Ka-thunk!_ Metal slammed on metal, gears engaged, and the familiar hum of the elevator's motor yanked him abruptly out of his dream. For a moment Aaron lay there in shock and disbelief as the dream's sweet ecstasy gave way to bitter reality. Words from an old song surged into his mind: _Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose_….

He glanced at the clock: Wednesday afternoon, August 11th. His 89th day of captivity.

_Please, God, my last._

The elevator was nearly at the bottom. Hotch hesitated, fingering the partially straightened paper clip in his pants pocket, wondering why Warden had come back so soon after his previous visit, knowing he had to decide _now _whether this thing was go or no-go. Abruptly he popped the clip into his mouth, a flick of his tongue pushing it down his right cheek to rest alongside his molars where it would be invisible to Warden. Just as it had the first time, it felt good to be doing something, to know he was prepared to finally take action! He fought back the urge to grin and instead made his face an expressionless mask.

There was the familiar thump, followed by a metallic clank as the elevator came to a halt and Warden stepped out into the antechamber. "Prisoner!" he called out. "Your hands!"

One last hurdle: He had to be cuffed facing forward.

He stood before the red bar and tentatively extended his hands so he was in the forward position. To his relief, Warden attached the cuffs without comment and without demanding that he face inward.

Still peering up at Aaron through the window, he asked the usual question. "What's your name?"

"Prisoner, sir."

"And mine?"

Hotchner barely blinked. "Warden, sir."

"Statements."

Hotchner recited them slowly and without either passion or resentment.

Warden nodded. Reaching into his right front pants pocket, he moved to Aaron's left, toward the door.

Hotch swallowed. _So… this is finally it. Showtime!_

_One one-thousand._ He all but spat the bent wire out into his hand.

_Two one-thousand._ He turned it so it was oriented properly.

_Three one-thousand. _His fingers unsteady, palms wet with perspiration, he inserted the wire into the keyhole. _Four_ _one-thousand_. _Five_ _one-thousand_.

It didn't connect. _Come on. Stay calm, keep steady. Six one-thousand._

One lock on the steel door clicked open.

_Seven_ _one-thousand. _Almost there. In some areas of endeavor, Hotchner was almost ambidextrous. Lockpicking, though, wasn't proving to be one of them.

_Eight_ _one-thousand._ He could feel rivulets of sweat running down his ribs. _Keep turning it, you'll find the point where it... Nine one-thousand. _His heart thundered.

_Stay focused. Yes, there it is, two clicks, just two clicks…. Ten one-thousand. That's one._

Another click and hum from the door.

_Eleven one-thousand. Ignore the door. Concentrate on what you're doing!_

He could feel the second click. _Thank God, thank God … Twelve one-thousand._

A bead of sweat made it past his left eyebrow and sent its salty sting into his eye. He blinked at it but didn't let it distract him from his … _Thirteen_ _one-thousand…. _

The cuff slid off his left wrist. As it did so, he heard the last lock release on the door.

_Fourteen one-thousand!_

_Here he is, here he comes, go for it, steady …_

As the door eased open he pivoted on his right foot, withdrew his left hand, and—

_**Shit! Shit! Shit!**_

—the open cuff caught on the fucking red bar, so though his left arm was free, his right was trapped across the front of his body. Desperately he reached up to untangle the cuff, but the unusual movement caught Warden's attention and in a flash his captor had the Enforcer out and powered up.

The first jolt caught Hotch on the right shoulder, and he choked back a strangled scream as his suddenly inflamed nerves contracted, causing his back to arch painfully. _No no no no, I can't let him do this, not when I'm so close…._ With a herculean effort, he made his left arm rise again, move toward the half-open cuff. _Just a little twist, that's all I need_—

This time Warden swung the Enforcer hard, baton-style, to smash into his left wrist. Because his nervous system was already on fire there was no sense of additional pain, but his hand immediately dropped limply to his side. He stared at it dumbly, willing it to move, but it was as though the limb were no longer a part of him.

The cuff on his right wrist had finally fallen free of the bar, but the arm it was attached to dangled uselessly at his side. Through a haze of pain he heard Warden screaming, his voice literally trembling with rage. "You bastard! I give you—you who deserve _nothing_—everything you need to serve your sentence in safety and comfort, even _luxury_, and this is how you repay me!"

He was spun around, dazed, the back of his head bouncing off the wall and his legs already buckling beneath him, his feet losing purchase. Warden's knee came up sharply between his thighs and _that_ he felt, holy Christ yes, he was dying with the pain, his diaphragm and his abdominal muscles spasming—_like a barfing cat_, he thought unhelpfully—and as Warden rose up (_no, I'm falling_) he swung the Enforcer like a fucking tennis racquet at Aaron's shoulders, his face, his head, and he couldn't do a thing to defend himself, not even cry out for mercy.

He kept falling sideways and it was like the times when his father really lost it: he thought _If I lie down he'll stop_. He remembered his father standing over him, panting, red-faced—with a belt, with a hairbrush, with a coat hanger. Once Aaron was on the floor, helpless, trying with all his being not to cry because _No son of mine is a whiner _but rarely very successful at it, his dad would look at him as if he'd just noticed him—almost as if he wasn't quite sure how this alien kid had got there—and he'd make a noise of disgust and walk away.

_Yes, please, just walk away,_ he thought at his captor desperately. _Pretty please, for the love of God, just walk away._

He'd thought that at the Reaper, too, and with about as little success. Again, he lay on his back, his aching body maddeningly unresponsive, looking up at a man whose only interest was in punishing him.

A kick to his left side nearly took his breath away, but there was still nothing he could do to protect himself. He was completely helpless.

"You will never—" _kick!_

"ever—" _kick!_

"see the world again unless _I_ allow it! Is that clear, Prisoner?"

He couldn't even nod his head, so he blinked furiously through his tears, hoping Warden would see, would stop the rain of blows from his fists, his feet, his knees. Although the man wasn't terribly strong, rage and the adrenaline rush had doubled what natural strength he had, and it was more than enough to kill if it continued much longer.

Warden moved out of his field of vision, and after a few seconds of panic, Hotch felt himself being rolled to his side. Charpentier fumbled with the string of his uniform pants and tugged them down off his hips. Aaron could think of two possibilities: rape, and the Enforcer against his genitals. Had he been wrong about Norton not profiling as a sexual sadist? His shirt and sweater were yanked up and over his head as one unit—with a slight hitch as the handcuffs, still dangling from his right wrist, caught on the sleeves—and he was rolled face-down.

He had been raped before. It had been unspeakable, but he'd survived. The Enforcer option troubled him more, recalling how pain had shot through his salivary glands for days after he was shocked on the underside of his jaw. He didn't know if the same thing would happen with testicles, and he preferred not to find out. He tried to relax. Whatever was about to happen, tension would just make it worse. _Lie back and enjoy it_ was a vile piece of hypocrisy, but _let it go and accept it for nothing but a set of physical sensations_ was a survival strategy.

Instead, his socks vanished, both pairs. Then arms that were his, yet not his, were yanked behind his back and he heard, rather than felt, the cuff being replaced around his left wrist.

His combat training told him to scissor his legs and knock his assailant to the floor.

Yeah, that was a laugh. He had so little control over his body that he couldn't even summon the breath required to beg. Warden stomped around the cell flinging things—mostly papers—and all he could do was try without success to form sounds.

He saw a sheet of trial transcript that had slid under his head and rested against his cheek. Blood oozed from his nose and mouth onto its pristine surface and he saw part of a name, Witbissell or Bitwessel or something, no, Bentwhistle, the forensic accountant, a piece of his testimony. He recalled with sudden, crazy clarity how two defendants had opted for a bench trial, how they'd had to keep the testimony free of all references to Stirling and Salazar. Recalled the scent of the mock orange bushes outside the courthouse. Recalled snipping off a bough of the fragrant flowers to take home to Haley, but she'd wanted to fight. She'd been waiting all day to fight, to find an outlet for her frustration.

Charpentier's knee slammed down hard between his shoulder blades, driving the breath out of him just as he was starting to get it back and sending a light spatter of blood droplets across the page of transcript. Warden's voice, little more than an icy hiss, sounded in his left ear, startling him. "If you must be an animal, then, fine. Animals wear no clothes and neither do ungrateful prisoners, so I'm taking all your clothing and food. You don't deserve them, but I'll leave your water dish and your bedding. Don't expect me back any time soon."

A moment later the door was open, then shut, and then the cell went dark.

_This is not the end. You can do this._

For a time he lay there whimpering reassurances to himself. Then, as he began to have a little more mastery over his body, he rolled carefully to his back. The scattered papers proved to be a blessing to him, providing a layer of insulation between his bare flesh and the frigid metal floor. He bent his knees, planting his feet flat on the floor and sliding them as close to his buttocks as he could manage.

When the last of the tremors had passed—all of them, those from the shocks, from fear, from rage, and from cold—he began to move. Slowly, awkwardly, lifting his knees high against his chest, he started to draw his cuffed wrists over his buttocks. Working against him was the fact that he was weaker than he had been when he entered Warden's cell. Working in his favor was the fact that he had dropped a few pounds and was, thanks to his stretching exercises, a little bit more flexible than he had been.

Once he'd "cleared the ass," as he started thinking of it during the process, he began to wriggle and roll, trying to work his feet, heels-first, through the same loop formed by his cuffed arms. It was a miserable process, a lot harder than it looked when James Bond types did it in the movies and on TV, and marked by multiple failures and pulled muscles. At one point, he farted, and it made him jump, and then laugh. Neither reaction was an immediate help to his efforts, which made him laugh all the harder.

Shit like that never seems to happen to your average cinematic secret agent.

Paradoxically, the laughter seemed to help in the end, easing his tension and loosening his muscles. He still peeled most of the skin off his wrists, but at some point—time was irrelevant there in the dark—he found himself curled on his side with his hands cuffed in front of him. Exhausted and dehydrated, throbbing from head to toe, he dragged the blankets down from his bed and arranged them around his shoulders, then groped for water. He found it still available in plastic bottles below the sink. Apparently the "water dish" shot had been nothing but ill-temper.

_Fuck you and your water dish, Warden_, he thought as he unscrewed the cap on one bottle._ I can do this. Blind people do it every goddamn day._


	35. Fallout

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. We're into the end of the middle now—and as obscure as that may sound to you, it makes sense to us. To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-Five**

**Fallout**

"I told you my car's in the shop, right?" Spencer Reid said on the afternoon of Thursday, the 12th of August.

The still form in a bed at George Washington University Hospital made an affirmative sound.

"Garcia dropped me off; Jess is picking me up, and I can hardly wait—she has that new red convertible. I'm gonna let my hair fly in the slipstream, maybe put on one of those long silky Isadora Duncan scarves. I'll feel just like one of those Kar-shack-ians girls."

The figure in the bed made a sound that was partially giggle, partially groan.

He'd spent the better part of the week sitting at Jennifer Jareau's bedside, where she'd been returned after Monday's disastrous takedown of Claymore Guffey in Colorado. He read to her from celebrity gossip magazines, deliberately mangling the names of celebrities that even he in his alleged ivory tower had heard of and knew how to pronounce.

Her face was puffy, her eyes blackened and swollen shut, and her upper torso swathed in yards and yards of tape to protect a damaged lung and nine ribs broken when the blast had blown her unceremoniously out the passenger-side window of the SUV, but she was incredibly lucky, and he knew she knew it. And even though every time Reid hesitated and then said, "Bee-yonky" or "Lindsay Loon," "Jack Goolen-hale" or "Zoozie Dess-channel," her laugh made her wince and cry out, it also measurably reduced her pain and stress. He could track the way her blood pressure had slowly returned to something closer to normal.

Laughter healed, even when it wasn't pretty. Reid knew this because he was organizer and central clearing house for all JJ-related Team activities.

Will was in the room every minute he could spare, but he only brought Henry in for a few minutes in the afternoon, during which he would, in a light, casual voice, mention "Mommy's boo-boos," then he and Henry would solemnly kiss them. LaMontagne was obviously beside himself with concern, but he refused to let his apprehension bleed over to the child. And as a third generation cop, he never once said anything like, "Honey, you're in the wrong racket." Risks came with the profession. Law enforcement wasn't for everyone, but for those who'd been bitten by it, there was no rational alternative.

Emily Prentiss, pretending she wasn't sore from the seven small-caliber rounds fired into her Kevlar vest, and Derek Morgan, wearing wide cargo pants to cover all the dressings over his shrapnel wounds, showed up every day, respectively, first thing in the morning and in mid-afternoon. Emily spooned yogurt into JJ's mouth and bellyached amusingly about learning to share her space with an adult cat who was used to being master of all he surveyed. Derek brought a different flavor of milkshake or Slurpee or Starbucks every day. While he held it patiently for her to suck on the straw, he would give her the skinny on who was sleeping with whom at the Bureau, in the most outrageous terms he could think of.

Rossi'd collected some of the Guffey coverage—especially of Jarmila (Sunny) Guffey on her local Fox outlet, calling her ex-husband everything but a man—and he was amusing himself in the evening by playing with video software, making little movies that owed as much to old Terry Gilliam animations as current YouTube memes. Anderson had contributed his own little film, capitalizing on Guffey's passing resemblance to the EPA official in the first _Ghostbusters_ movie and highlighting the line, "This man has no dick."

JJ couldn't actually see them very clearly yet, but Spencer and Dave gleefully narrated them for her.

Reid had never been prouder to be part of this Team, this family. They'd taken hideous losses starting in '09 with the whole Reaper mess—hell, starting when Gideon abandoned them, and even before that, with the explosion in Boston before Reid came on board—but they'd stuck together and supported one another. And when they, God willing, brought Hotch home, they'd do the same thing.

Reid stood and stretched. He peered out the window and reported, "Whatever they've been doing across the street with that little crane, I guess they're done. They're starting to ratchet it down toward street level. Sky's dark to the west, looks like we'll get that rain after all."

He pressed JJ's hand and she returned the squeeze.

"Thanks," she muttered thickly around loose teeth and a swollen tongue. "See you tomorrow, Spence."

"My privilege," he murmured, and dropped a little kiss on her forehead. "You're so hot when you're messed up."

She mumbled, "Making me laugh again," —or something that sounded pretty much like it.

Five minutes later, he was at street level and climbing into Jessica Brooks's new red Mustang convertible. Jack, safe in his car seat behind Jessica, called gleeful greetings to him. "We're bein' doggies!" he crowed. "We stickin' out our tongues, letting our ears flop in the air! And we bark, we go, _Arf! Arf! Aa-roooo!_"

Reid snapped his seat belt on and turned and grinned at the boy. "Wow, I hope I can bark that well!" he said. "How does that go? 'Eek! Eek! Meow'?"

The boy's laugh was delicious, like water splashing down from a fountain. "No, you're _silly_, Spensa-reid! It's _Arf! Arf! Aa-roo!_"

Spencer batted his eyes at Jessica, her hair disheveled, her sunglasses stuck up above her forehead. "What do _you_ think? Am I _silly_?"

Her hand landed lightly on his left knee and she gave him full eye contact. "I think you're _amazingly_ silly," she purred. "Now let's hear a decent bark out of you, or we'll just sit here."

Part of him wanted to say that if sitting there would mean her hand stayed right there on his thigh, then he was all for it, but he knew better. "I guess I'll try again," he said with as much enthusiasm as he could manage. "_Bawk-Bawk-Ba-Oink_!"

Jack and Jessica both laughed, and her hand slid an inch or so up his leg.

_Gotta stop this before anything noticeable happens._

"Um,_ Arf! Arf! Aa-roo!_" he howled. A couple passersby glanced over in their direction.

Jack cheered. Jessica's hand tightened on his thigh. "That was awesome, Spensa-reid," she purred. "You can howl with me any old time. With _us_."

_Holy crap_, he thought, truly stunned. _She's doing that deliberately._

"Well," he said, trying for the kind of double-entendre that the cool people seemed to manage so effortlessly, "as long as you keep giving me something to howl about."

Her hand slid another couple inches up his thigh. "I imagine we could manage that."

Before he was forced to think of something else vaguely witty, she lifted her hand, popped her sunglasses down and slid the gearshift into Drive. "Arf! Arf! Aa-roo!" she howled into the warm winds of rush hour in Georgetown.

_Actually, the JJ bedside stuff is easier than this…. _

**~ o ~**

The elevator shuddered to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. The man who had been Norton Charpentier opened the scissor-gate and let himself into the enormous anteroom, trying not to look at the back of the cell as he steered the little shopping cart before him.

_Coraggio_, he told himself. _He is tough, strong, and determined. He is a survivor._

He raised his voice. "Are you awake?" he called.

The response was a ragged rasp, but a full sentence. "Yes, I am." A defiant sentence.

Warden slid the window open. Prisoner sat swathed in a sheet draped like a toga around him, blinking in the light from the window. He wore blankets around his shoulders like a cloak. His hands, now cuffed in front of him, rested on his lap.

His pale and battered face was clean-shaven and his hair was brushed. His quarters were tidy, every last piece of paper gathered into even stacks in the cardboard boxes from the fish market.

Warden felt a rush of something he could only identify as _pride_ in his captive, the way he had felt when his daughter accomplished something of note. True, Ellie's expression had shouted _Look what I did!_ Prisoner's expression, what there was of it, seemed closer to _Fuck you and the horse you rode in on._

He wondered why his captive's attitude, far from troubling him, aroused excitement and self-congratulations. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was the hope that Prisoner could be brought to true contrition without having to be broken, like a wild animal. Perhaps Prisoner would willingly demonstrate genuine repentance, which was always more satisfying, more credible, than a confession wrung from the unwilling. After all, he'd managed to obey all of the rules, even shackled, beaten, and in total darkness. That took some kind of grit.

"What is your name?" Warden asked.

"Prisoner, sir." His voice was quiet, reserved. OK, not so _fuck-you_ as Norton had first thought.

"And mine?"

"Warden, sir." He lowered his head, took a breath. "And, Warden—I need to apologize to you. Not because I got caught, and not to wiggle out of whatever—" he paused and sighed as if searching for a word "—whatever punishment you think I have coming to me. Because you've always been as good as your word. Because other than bringing me here in the first place, whether I agree with you or not, you've always been straight with me. And I want to be civil. I want to cooperate. I want to do a better job of surviving here." He peered up at Norton through the window. "Am I making sense?"

"To an extent." Charpentier found it mildly amusing that semantically Prisoner preferred _civil_ and _cooperate_ to _respectful_ and _obey_. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking that something significant had happened in the dark-haired man's psyche over the past four days. He flipped on the interior lights and waited until the lawyer's eyes had adapted to them. "And now, your statements?"

Hotchner nodded slightly, glanced upward for a few seconds, and began to speak. While there was no particular conviction in his delivery, it wasn't wooden, either. He read them—respectfully.

_Progress._

"Come to the window."

Prisoner slid the blankets off his shoulders, wrapped the sheet a little more tightly around his waist, and stood up. He was weak and obviously still hurting from the beating he'd received four days earlier.

"Stand still and drop the sheet," Norton directed.

The man seemed slightly surprised, but without hesitation he untangled the sheet from about his arms and waist and let it fall to the floor. His nakedness probably bothered Norton more than it did him. His weight loss was appalling, and his body was dark with bruises.

"Turn around." The back and sides were worse than the front, with a vivid record of Norton's foot and his knee, as well as some deep scrapes that probably occurred while the man was trying to get his hands in front of him. "Thank you," he said. "You can pick up the sheet again, or I can just unlock your cuffs and give you your uniform."

Prisoner glanced down at the floor, apparently considering his options. Then he bent to retrieve his wrappings and tossed them back onto the cot. Charpentier was startled to hear himself say, "I'm ashamed of those bruises."

Hotchner hesitated. "Sir?"

"I lost control. You'd probably say that I let my temper write the script. I had a responsibility to be the grownup in the room, and I failed. Come on, give me your hands."

Hotchner's wrists were a raw mess, purple from the backs of his hands to several inches up his forearms. When Charpentier unlocked them, Prisoner closed his eyes and uttered a deep sigh of relief. "Thank you," he whispered.

Norton examined the ridges the cuffs had left, unable to avoid wincing at the wounds. "I'll get you some gauze for these," he said. "You've probably run out of aspirin and first-aid cream completely."

"Yes, sir."

He reached down to the little plastic parson's table and picked up the bundle there. "Here's a clean uniform, a sweater, and this—" He added a small plastic cooler to the pile. "—chicken salad sandwiches, some macaroni, chips. Some soda." He smiled thinly. "Basic picnic crap, but guaranteed peanut butter-and-honey-free. Eat slowly. I'll be back in half an hour or so."

He turned hurriedly away from the window, unable to hide his horror and embarrassment any longer.

Yes, he'd been outraged at his prisoner, but how could he have inflicted all of that violence on a man who'd done nothing more than—_be honest, now, Nort_—than any man would've tried at least once, if he had the chance? He'd beaten him so viciously with the Enforcer that he'd broken the thing and he wasn't sure it could even be repaired.

Mars and Saturn hadn't worked in his favor at all; rather the opposite.

He gathered a few more supplies and poked through a chest of over-the-counter meds until he found a first-aid cream that had decent analgesic qualities. Then he did a quick survey of the objects he had taken from the room.

When he returned, Prisoner wore his magenta uniform and the dark blue sweater. He'd eaten and now sat on his bed enjoying the first-time luxury of a can of Mountain Dew. He drank it slowly, which was a good thing. He'd suffered from caffeine withdrawal when he'd first arrived at the bunker; now his body was no longer acclimated to it.

"Come to the window," he commanded. "Arms out."

Prisoner set down his can of soda and obeyed.

"This is Neosporin Plus Pain Relief," Charpentier told him. "It won't work any miracles, but it may make a little bit of difference." He applied it thickly on the lawyer's forearms and wrists then handed him the tube, a heavy roll of gauze, and a roll of micropore tape. "When you get your resource package, there will be additional Vitamins C and D to aid in your recovery."

He thought he probably had some oxycodone left over from a dental procedure a few months earlier, but that was back in State College. By the time he could bring it back, Prisoner most likely wouldn't need it anymore.

The lawyer thanked him in a subdued voice and accepted the first-aid items. He retreated to his cot, where he began wrapping his wrists in the gauze, ripping the tape with his teeth.

"Now—of the things I took from your cell, which three are most important for you to earn back?"

Prisoner looked at him oddly for a few seconds, then replied, "The clock, the pictures."

"I said three."

"Those two are the only ones I consider critical to my mental state—the clock and my family pictures. The playing cards are nice, so are the books, but I can survive without them."

"Then I'll bring what you requested in an hour or so. I'd like you to be able to exercise, but I don't want to put the cuffs back on those wrists this soon."

The lawyer thought about that for a few seconds. "It's all right," he said quietly. "I don't mind putting them back on so I can go out there."

"It's important for you to exercise? What if you have a cracked rib?"

"I don't think I do. I'm sore, but—it feels pretty superficial. And I really want to get out of here—" His eyes dropped briefly. "If it's all right with you, Warden."

_It's small, it's subtle,_ Norton realized with mixed emotions, _but in some ways, he's a broken man_.

**~ o ~**

He felt almost pathetically grateful to be in the exercise cage again with Garth Brooks on the boombox singing about his friends in low places.

The very last thing Aaron Hotchner wanted was to be shut into his cell with the lights on and the transcript available—at least not while Warden was right there, in his face, full of all his weirdly solicitous questions.

_I'm ashamed of those bruises_, Norton had said.

But not half as ashamed as Aaron suspected he himself was going to feel once he had a chance to go through the transcripts, and he wanted complete privacy when he did it. During his long hours in the dark, throbbing with pain and resentment, he'd relived hours and hours of that fucking trial, and some of it was…troubling, at the least.

He removed his sweater, pulled on the canvas gloves, and attacked the wall with the pickaxe, wondering whose unfamiliar version of "Hit the Road, Jack" he was hearing. His body was miserably stiff and sore, but it was better to work out, to work through his confusion, than to face it with Warden still present. He swung the pickaxe viciously, putting his whole body into each stroke, watching with satisfaction as chips of rock face fell to the floor.

His error—well, his current error—had been to fasten on his exchanges with Charpentier as the source for any problem that had arisen. Not surprisingly, he'd found nothing but modest evidence of his immaturity, and a childish mean streak, at that stage of his life. When he'd finally allowed his memory to wander to other aspects of his life at the time—the tangle of complications that the request for the bench trial had triggered, since Stirling had been one of their principal targets; the miserable state of his marriage at that juncture; George Van der Weese's spring allergies kicking up—other things had fallen into place. They'd resonated painfully with one of Warden's first "education sessions."

Some questions now loomed desperately critical, but he was goddamned if he wanted Nortie around as a witness when he got his answers. The questions were these: Was there a _duces tecum_ order in place? Did it refer specifically to Nortie? If so, what did it cover? When was it filed? Was it in place prior to the opening of the trial? If not, were there any other relevant orders?

Even putting ethics aside for the moment, with the wrong answers, he was well and truly busted for what he'd thought at the time was an insignificant decision: not to bother passing on something he'd learned in discovery.

Such a lapse was always unethical. Always stupid.

Under worst-case conditions, it would be fatal for Aaron Hotchner, because worst-case, he had single-handedly prevented them from dropping Norton Charpentier off the defendant list. Everything that had happened to Charpentier thereafter—his wife's possibly stress-induced miscarriage, his conviction and imprisonment, his wife's search for employment that had put her and her daughter on some road late at night to die—was directly attributable to Aaron's failure to act.

"If you're trying to dig your way out, you're on the wrong side of the mountain," Warden's voice said.

Hotchner let the pickaxe fall from his grip and tried to grin. "I'm a patient man," he said, "and all I've got is time."

His attempt must have been successful, because Charpentier grinned back at him as he dropped into what might be considered his "visitor's chair" outside the exercise cage. The little guy cracked open a bottle of apple juice and looked Hotchner up and down curiously.

"How come you never wear your SpongeBob uniform?" he asked.

_Oh, man, I do not want to have a fight over this one…. _

"I can't," Aaron replied honestly. "It creeps me out."

"I thought you might enjoy—"

"Exactly the opposite," he snapped. "It just makes me miss him. We used to watch the show together; it was our guilty pleasure."

"_Guilty_ pleasure?"

"Haley—my late wife—totally hated SpongeBob. So Jack and I had this thing where, it was like a guy thing." Jack's imitation of Patrick was so perfect that it always broke him up. Hotch himself felt that he did a passable SpongeBob, but his real talent was imitating Mr. Krabs. It had _really_ pissed Haley off when he did Mr. Krabs.

Charpentier nodded slowly. "In that case," he said, his tone serious, "give them back to me. I'll take in the pants and use them for pajamas." He grinned again, slightly. "I'm pretty good at sewing, another of those things I picked up in the slammer, since the average jumpsuit wasn't designed for my dimensions."

Aaron wiped his forehead and neck with the canvas gloves and sat down in his own chair. He reached into the cooler and located his own bottle of apple juice. "You won't feel goofy if you wear SpongeBob jammies?"

"Nah." Norton took a long drink of juice. "Opposites again. You know, I watch it sometimes when I'm tired and just want to clear my head." He turned grave blue eyes to Hotchner. "I keep forgetting that time goes on. I watch it and I think, boy, Ellie would get a kick out of this show, the personalities, the wordplay. Then I have to remind myself that she'd be twenty-five now, probably out of grad school, maybe married. It's like she's frozen forever in my mind at seven or eight."

For the first time ever, Hotchner felt, not contempt, not professional curiosity, but a stab of guilt at this fairly decent little man's humanity. He consciously changed the subject.

"Who did that version of 'Hit the Road, Jack'?" he asked. "The one that played about twenty minutes ago."

Charpentier's brow furrowed. "Suzi Quatro. Diana was nuts about Suzi Quatro, had all her albums."

"So how did you two manage to get along, with you into symphonies and her into rock?"

Charpentier chuckled. "I'm no one-trick pony, man. Our first real, honest-to-goodness date, we went to see Wings Over America, the 1976 tour. Cost me a month's allowance and it was well worth it."

"Wait—how old are you, anyway?"

"That depends. Norton Charpentier would be fifty this coming November."

"And—whoever you are now?"

Warden shrugged. "Beggars can't be choosers when identities fall into their laps. I turned sixty this past spring."

"So—who are you, anyway?"

Warden wasn't buying it. "I used to be Norton Charpentier. Now, my most important identity is as your Warden."

_Great. So much for trying to figure out a way to signal his identity to the Team…._


	36. Coming to Hard Truths

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. We're heading into the home stretch and resolution before too long here, folks! To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-Six**

**Coming to Hard Truths**

_It was a blustery day at the tail end of an ugly February in Baltimore, 1993. Haley'd been a bitch on wheels half the night, culminating in the savage words, _Maybe you should be more like your dad and slap me around a little; at least I'd know for sure that you notice me!_ He'd slept on the couch and dressed in the dark and he had the wrong tie on and a crick in his neck and he'd been puddle-swiped by some jerkoff in a minivan two blocks from the courthouse and his left trouser leg was still damp at half-past ten in spite of Cyn Allgood's best efforts with a roll of paper towels, and once again he was deposing the minnowiest of the minnows when he wasn't doing a fucking coffee run for Desmond and Van der Weese._

_Oh, and he'd promised, cross-his-heart, that he would faithfully, absolutely, be home by six because her parents were driving up to Baltimore for dinner and so they could snipe openly about her housekeeping and his wine consumption, and by the way, exactly when would there be grandchildren? _

_Oh, yeah. Today was definitely all over the "not a good day" list._

In his underground cell, just a glance at the relevant portions of the transcript had triggered a vivid memory of the day and the scrawny, pimpled nonentity who'd been his primary pretrial deponent that morning.

_TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH WITNESS STEVEN CHARLES KNOEBEL_

_conducted by A. Hotchner_

_February 23, 1993_

_11:05 A.M._

_Mr. Hotchner: Mr. Knoebel, is that pronounced "Noble" or "K'noble"?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Noble.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Okay. What was your job at Mr. Sinclair's business?  
>Mr. Knoebel: I was a casual parts stocker and puller.<br>Mr. Hotchner: And what is that?  
>Mr. Knoebel: I made sure all the auto parts were kept in stock and pulled them from the shelves as orders came in.<br>Mr. Hotchner: And the "casual" part of the job description?  
>Mr. Knoebel: I only worked a couple days a week, you know, like when I needed the cash.<br>Mr. Hotchner: And did you have access to any financial records, on computer or otherwise?  
>Mr. Knoebel: No, that wasn't part of my job. I was just kind of a go-fer.<br>Mr. Hotchner: As in "go for" this or that part?  
>Mr. Knoebel: [nods]<br>Mr. Hotchner: You have to answer my questions verbally for the record.  
>Mr. Knoebel: Yes, as in "go for" parts.<em>

It had been mind-numbing work, deposing literally dozens of guys who did occasional pick-up labor at Sinclair's auto parts place, none of whom had ever been in a position to see anything even remotely of interest. _But we have to depose them all_, Van der Weese had reminded him, _because you just never know_, and Aaron had known he was right, had known that even high-profile cases could turn on seemingly insignificant details.

Maybe it would have meant more if he hadn't finished up by saying, _And could you bring me another decaf, Aaron? Cream, one sugar, thanks ever so much, son…._

He looked across the cell at the clock. It was early on Thursday morning, the 19th of August, and the 97th day of his captivity. Eight days since Warden had beaten the living crap out of him. Some purple patches were beginning to turn interesting shades of green and yellow; he was quite the colorful guy lately. The wrists were the worst. It would take at least a month before they started to look like anything other than a mess.

_Focus, man._

He knew he had to do this, but the further along he went, the less enthusiastic he became. He was pretty sure that he would find something he didn't want to know. He had no idea how it would, if and when he found it, change his relationship with his captor.

In his own creepy little way, Charpentier was kind of a nice guy. In spite of Aaron's escape attempt, he'd returned everything—every damned thing—that he'd taken from Hotchner's cell. The clock, the books, the pictures, the playing cards, the magnets with which he could decorate his walls. Everything except the SpongeBob SquarePants scrubs. Those, he'd taken with him. In their place he'd left a replacement third uniform, a kind of dull, off-red, a shade that Garcia, his color expert, would probably identify as "almost-tomato."

_Focus. _He forced himself to read on.

_Mr. Hotchner: Were you acquainted with a Norton, uh, Charpentier at your workplace?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Yeah, I knew Norton, but not too well. He'd only been there a couple, maybe three months.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did he ever discuss his work with you?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Not really. I knew he did something financial, a bookkeeper, I think. He never talked about anything specific.<br>Mr. Hotchner: What did he talk about?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Oh, occasionally we'd eat lunch together. We'd just talk about regular stuff, you know, movies, music, sports.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did Mr. Charpentier ever meet privately with Mr. Sinclair, so far as you knew?  
>Mr. Knoebel: I saw them talking lots of times. Sometimes Norton would go into Jerry's, I mean, Mr. Sinclair's, office. When he did that, he usually shut the door so I don't know what they talked about.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did you ever happen to see what was on Mr. Charpentier's computer screen as he was working?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Well, the office is pretty small. Norton didn't have his own office, he sat in the common area at whatever desk was empty.<br>Mr. Hotchner: What about when he used the computer?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Jerry—Mr. Sinclair—he's kind of a tightwad, got a real old computer for the front office, you know? Hooks up to like a normal TV set instead of one of those special computer-screen things.<br>Mr. Hotchner: You mean a monitor?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Yeah. Real old set-up.<br>Mr. Hotchner: And when Mr. Charpentier used the computer, how was he oriented?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Oriented? Oh, the computer was over on his left side and the TV set, big old twenty-one-inch jobbie, was on his right, with the keyboard right in front of it.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Could you see the monitor, or TV, screen, from where you worked?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Nope, couldn't nobody see it except whoever was using it on account of the catalog shelves were in the way. You know? From where they looked up part numbers?<em>

Hotchner felt his stomach muscles clenching as he crept ever closer to the most critical part of the interview. It was like waiting for a verdict from a jury, only worse, because it was his own downfall that was potentially in play.

_Mr. Hotchner: Did you ever see anything that was on the screen of the computer?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Well, once I had to go around him to get something and I did happen to notice some kind of spreadsheet open on his screen.<br>Mr. Hotchner: You mean an accounting spreadsheet?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Yeah, like that.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did you ever see Mr. Charpentier's briefcase?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Sure. He carried it with him just about all the time.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did you ever see the contents of that briefcase?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Sometimes on my break I'd go visit with Norton—he's a nice guy—and the briefcase'd be there on the desk next to where he was working. It was usually stuffed full of all kinds of papers, and he always kept his lunch in there too.<br>Mr. Hotchner: He always brought his own lunch?  
>Mr. Knoebel: That's right. He said going out to lunch was a waste of time and money.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Mr. Knoebel, did you ever see cassette tapes in Mr. Charpentier's briefcase?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Hmmm. No, I don't—oh, wait. He brought music tapes with him sometimes. He was kind of a funny guy. Sometimes he'd listen to his Walkman while he worked.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did Mr. Charpentier ever have computer disks with him at work?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Sure. He had a box of disks he kept in his briefcase. Work stuff, I guess.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did you ever borrow any tapes or disks from Mr. Charpentier?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Well…. [pauses]<br>Mr. Hotchner: The question is a simple one, Mr. Knoebel. Did you ever borrow any tapes or disks from Mr. Charpentier?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Um, well, once I kinda borrowed a tape from him—<br>Mr. Hotchner: What does 'kinda borrowed' mean? Did you steal it from him?  
>Mr. Knoebel: No, no! It was just...one time Mr. Sinclair called Norton into his office and I just figured Norton wouldn't mind if I borrowed one of his cassettes for a little while—I mean, I listened to music on the job sometimes too, Mr. Sinclair didn't mind as long as we got our work done—<br>Mr. Hotchner: Do you recall what cassette you borrowed?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Yeah, it said Zep on the cover, I figured it's metal—<br>Mr. Hotchner: I'm sorry?  
>Mr. Knoebel: Zep, capital Z capital E capital P. I figured Led Zep, you know. I love Zep, man. I remember being surprised he was into metal, I mean, he doesn't exactly seem like a metalhead, you know? But turned out it had classical sh—classical music on it.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did you return the cassette to Mr. Charpentier?  
>Mr. Knoebel: I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did. I came in that next Friday, the week after the raid, you know, to get my paycheck, and I think I probably stuck it in his mail slot.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Did you ever borrow any computer disks from Mr. Charpentier?  
>Mr. Knoebel: No, why would I do that?<br>Mr. Hotchner: I'm required to ask about all forms of magnetic media, Mr. Knoebel. [Pause.] Very well, I think we're almost finished here. One last thing: Do you have any other information about Mr. Charpentier that would be relevant to this proceeding?  
>Mr. Knoebel: No, I don't think so. Like I said, we really didn't know each other all that well. He seemed like a good enough guy, though. Guess it's like the old saying, huh? Can't tell a book by its cover.<br>Mr. Hotchner: Indeed. Well, thank you for coming in, Mr. Knoebel.  
>Mr. Knoebel: Will I have to testify in court?<br>Mr. Hotchner: Probably not. We'll get in touch if we need you._

_INTERVIEW CONCLUDED  
>11:27 A.M.<em>

And there it was, part one of the official indictment against him. It looked so freaking innocent, but there it was in black and white, a tribute to Aaron Hotchner's crappy judgment. He'd known that there was a piece of magnetic media belonging to Charpentier that hadn't been on the premises at the time of the raid back in September.

Part two came later that day.

_Van der Weese raised his eyebrows and smiled. "Someone's in a hurry tonight."_

"_Yeah, in-laws are in town for the evening," he confessed. He generally found Van der Weese easy to be straight with. "And if I want to keep my balls I better make a timely appearance."_

"_Then you'd best hurry," Van der Weese said. "Anything useful to report today?"_

_Hotchner had glanced anxiously at the clock—damn near five, and given the weather and rush-hour traffic, it was gonna be a hell of a near thing to get home in time. He'd considered the classical shit tape, considered Norton Charpentier's annoying superiority and his obvious guilt. Calculated that the odds were staggeringly against that fat fuck having hidden any damn super-secret spy-on-my-brother-in-law bullshit on a tape full of classical music._

"_Absolutely nothing," he assured Van der Weese, knowing he was prevaricating and not caring._

_Van der Weese made some notes of his own and then grinned up at him over his glasses. "So?" he prompted. "Scoot! Go home to your pretty little wife and save your nuts; I may need them some day."_

Any and all magnetic media, the subpoena had demanded. An old system, Knoebel even told him it was an old system, hailing back to TV sets and RS-232 connections instead of monitors—and cassette tapes to store data.

A tape of Brahms' First Symphony had held the data Norton Charpentier had been gathering on Wassermann, Sinclair, and company. A cassette marked **ZFP **in black marker. ZFP, for _Zap __the Fucking Pedophiles_. That information had been on the subpoena that was in George Van der Weese's possession, a subpoena Hotchner had claimed that he'd read seriously, but in fact he'd just glanced over. But here it was, just another feature of the transcript for him to appreciate.

If Hotchner had spoken up that night, had bitten the bullet, been a little late home, had faced Haley's anger, and worse, her disappointment—had _done his goddamn job and acted strictly according to ethics_—they would have dropped their charges against Norton Charpentier. Nortie might even have been a hero of sorts. He would still have a wife, a daughter who'd turned twenty-five, maybe even grandkids who watched SpongeBob. George Van der Weese would still live in New Hampshire.

Warden had been right. Nothing he could do to Aaron could possibly cut as deep as this—the knowledge of his culpability—did. After all, he was Aaron-fucking-Hotchner, Mr. Morally Upright, Mr. Do the Right Thing.

He staggered to his feet, sending dozens of loose pages of transcript flying, and fell to his knees in front of the toilet, where he vomited until his sides ached, until there was nothing left but dry heaves and guilt.

**~ o ~**

When Charpentier pulled into the Hawthornes' long driveway early on Saturday, the 21st, Ted Hawthorne was already out in the side yard, ripping away at the brush that constantly tried to encroach on their little island of civilization. Norton—well, _Joe_ or _Sarge_, here—called out to him, but the old engineer apparently had his hearing aid out or off. He hadn't even heard the crunch of Norton's tires on the gravel.

Rather than distract Ted, who startled more easily as he aged, Norton just entered the house through the side door. He found Bren curled up in the breakfast nook with a pencil and her morning puzzles as a mellifluous NPR voice murmured in the background. She looked up and beamed when she saw him.

"Well, look who's decided to darken our doorstep!" she called out gaily. "And in the daylight, no less!"

"Morning, Miz Bren," Nortie said. He stepped into the nook and kissed her forehead. "How are you holding up against the Sudoku monsters today?"

"Barely holding my own. Saturday's is always a pisser. How's your week gone?"

He scooted into the bench seat across from her. "Busy as a bee. Just as I finally start getting into the rhythm of summer, academia calls."

"Already! That's something I don't miss in the least, Sarge. When I was a youngster, the start of the new academic year filled me with excitement and enthusiasm. By the end, it was, 'Oh, crap, Ted, here we go again'—a merry-go-round without the 'merry.' You want some coffee?"

"Thanks, but no, sweetheart. If I'm really honest about it, what I need is your can; my back teeth've been floating since the turnoff by Schuller Brothers."

"Well, go—don't piddle on my quilted seats!"

He got up, whizzed, and returned to find a cup of coffee waiting for him. "Just like that, I'm supposed to go for a refill?" he teased.

She removed her glasses and let them drop on their chain around her neck. "Just like that. Hey, how did that Guffey thing impact on your big mystery search for the FBI guy?"

"Yeah, I saw that online," he replied. "Big mess, huh?" He wished he could tell Bren that he'd known that Guffey'd faked his own abduction because he had his very own pet profiler to sic on the problem. "I'll bet the Bureau's furious at all that waste of time and resources that they threw at trying to rescue him."

_And they're furious at me, too. If they track me down, will they send SWAT teams in through my front and back doors? Will I go down in a hail of bullets? _

_Will Ted remember to open the "Open in Case of My Unexpected Death" envelope? Will he remember that it's there? Or will Aaron starve to death because I'm not there to care for him? _

_Maybe I should tell Bren about it, too._

_Except she's such a nebby thing she'd have it steamed open and read before I was out of her driveway._

He was vaguely aware that he'd just thought of his prisoner by his first name. "I'm sorry?" he said, realizing that Bren was talking to him again.

"I said, the last gullywasher seems to have caused more cracks in the stable floor," she said with a sigh. "If we have another autumn full of thunderstorms, we may have to call in the contractors."

"Well, let me know," he said. "I appreciate that space for Burley and me more than I can ever express. You guys and this place really are my hold on sanity."

"You must know those woods like I know my kitchen cabinets," Bren said. "You spend enough time out there these days."

"You can never know the wilderness completely," he replied. "It's ever-changing."

They chatted for a bit longer. She offered him a huge piece of raspberry coffee cake; he ate part of it and asked for a plastic container for the remainder, _so I can eat it out on the trail_. Then he left, dropped his gym bag in his room above the stables, gathered the extra supplies he'd brought, saddled up Burley, and headed for the narrow cavern entrance to the bunker.

**~ o ~**

Once Norton was down in the cool dimness of the bunker, he thumped a hand against the metal wall. "Are you awake?" he called to the lawyer.

There was a significant silence before the familiar low voice rasped, "Yes."

He released the catch and slid the square window open—and he _knew_.

His prisoner, in red scrubs and the gray cardigan, sat huddled in the near corner of his bunk, his broad shoulders the hypotenuse to the right angles of the wall, his knees drawn up close to his chest. His pale features seemed slack and lost. A pen and a legal pad lay beside him.

And Norton Charpentier hadn't the slightest idea what to say. Aaron Hotchner had finally discovered the nature of his crime; of that, Norton was sure. It was carved into the lines of his face and shone in his haunted eyes.

Stick with the basics, the familiar.

"What's your name?"

The lawyer took a breath, then another one. "Prisoner, sir," he said in a dull voice.

"And mine?"

"Warden, sir."

"Your statements?"

This time it was a long, slow breath. "Let me put this in my own words," Prisoner said in the feeblest of whispers. "I failed utterly to meet my professional responsibilities. There was no conspiracy, no conscious intent, but there was failure. There was a devastating failure to follow through. You lost everything—your family, your livelihood, your life—and a substantial part of that loss is my fault. I see that now and I acknowledge it."

Well, that was nice to hear, but Charpentier felt he had to hold to the rules.

"Your statements."

Hotchner nodded and repeated the statements, his voice still barely audible. There still wasn't much _oomph_ to them, but they certainly weren't wooden.

"You realize, don't you, Prisoner, that it took you ninety-nine days to figure this out?"

The man in the cell seemed to collapse even further in on himself. "Yes, sir." His voice was bleak, beaten—devoid of both energy and hope. Charpentier found himself unaccountably depressed by this, in spite of the fact that it was an outcome he'd dreamed of, prayed for, worked toward for the better part of a year.

"Hands," he said.

The lawyer rose to his feet and crossed to the window almost listlessly. His wrists seemed to have improved slightly, but there was a long way to go. Charpentier handed him the cuffs. He snapped them on himself carefully, no expression whatever on his face.

"How are you doing on Neosporin?" Norton asked. "Need a replacement yet?"

Prisoner shook his head mutely.

Norton felt almost overwhelmed by the urge to seize the man by the shoulders and shake a little spirit back into him.

_Right. Like that would work._

Charpentier found himself confronting the wisdom of the old adage:_ Be careful what you wish for; you might get it._


	37. Ourobouros

A/N 1: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. We're heading into the home stretch and resolution before too long here, folks! To all of you who take the trouble to comment, praise, or criticize, to ask questions, to guess what's coming next, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-Seven**

**Ourobouros**

_He'd been asleep—or at least, trying to sleep, in that muggy, inhospitable pit of tears and misery—when the guards rousted him, searched him, chained him hand and foot, and shoved him down shadowy corridors. He asked what he had done and they silenced him. He asked again and one of them dropped him with a Taser to the back of his neck. Complaining loudly and (at least by their own lights) amusingly about his weight, they'd dragged him face-down through three sally ports to one of the lawyer-client rooms and left him there, alone on the floor._

_He had been alone in the dark for so many days already that even this was human contact of a sort, and therefore an occasion for gratitude. He lay there passive and waited for the public defender who'd taken up his appeals, but the scuffed Rockports that entered belonged to the Reverend John Septimus Parkhurst, an Episcopal chaplain at the Marion Federal Correctional Facility._

"_Put him in a chair," Parkhurst demanded of the guards who accompanied him. _

_There was some sort of conference out in the hall, and someone said, "Negative, Reverend. He's been resistive and combative."_

"_For the love of God," Parkhurst said, his voice quivering, "allow the man to sit in a chair."_

"_He made his choice," the same guard replied. "He had his druthers, and it was that. He was combative with the collection team."_

_Right. Asking questions was resistance. Was combat. _And why in the hell is Parkhurst here?

_He'd met the man only once, when he'd stopped by in Charpentier's first week there. Norton had been ashamed of his tears, but Parkhurst had seemed not to notice them. Had spoken softly, gently, about courage and about what the chaplaincy corps could and could not offer, had recommended some classes and groups for when Norton was out of reception._

_And now, he lowered his elderly bones to the floor and lay down beside Charpentier._

"_I don't advise that," the guard said._

"_Fortunately, I haven't asked your advice," the chaplain observed, his voice still mild, gentle. Norton thought the man reminded him, in manner if not appearance, of TV's Mister Rogers._

_He peered through his trifocals at Norton, and his pale blue eyes were sad and gentle._

"_I am so very sorry," Parkhurst said. "So very sorry to tell you that there has been an auto accident in Maryland."_

_And Norton Charpentier's life had ended. Oh, the name had waddled on for a few years more, and the massive body for a little longer, but his spirit had died there on the floor of Attorney-Client Room CXR-0221, and the last thing he'd beheld was Parkhurst's anguished sympathy._

…

Now, standing there in the bunker below the mountain, he wondered what had brought on that hideous memory, the absolute nadir of his existence. His fingers fiddled idly with the zipper of his hoodie as he gazed, unseeing, at the metal wall.

Prisoner.

Right.

The man whose perfidy had put him at Marion stood at the window, his cuffed hands fisted, his head bowed low against the wall. In Norton's fevered fantasies, the lawyer had crawled on his hands and knees, sobbing, begging for mercy. The reality was silence and stillness. It was nothing at all like Charpentier's fantasies.

Charpentier actually had to command himself to look up, to notice. To think.

He opened the three locks, the sense memory of the man's escape attempt still fresh in his mind and his nerve endings, but no. His own prisoner barely stirred, no longer even showing any interest in Norton's entrance. The door shut with a clank and an electronic snick, and the lawyer remained motionless.

Charpentier sat down on the cot.

"You say that you failed to meet your professional responsibilities?" he asked. He wondered whether his voice sounded as distant, as foreign and distorted, to Prisoner as it did to his own ears.

"Yes." The word was just barely audible, even here in the deepest of silences.

"So it was just a slip, an oopsie?"

All he could hear was the annoying _tip-tip-tip_ of the clock on the wall. He'd chosen it because although it was digital and displayed the date as well as time, it also ticked away seconds. It had been his hope that the constant sound in the silence would serve as something like the proverbial Chinese water torture for his captive.

At the moment, he seemed to be the only person whom the _tip-tip-tip_ was annoying.

"It was beyond error," the man by the wall finally said. "It was failure."

"So, like—oh, who was it? Wasn't it Ciano who said, '_La victoria trova cento padri, e nessuno vuole riconoscere l'insuccesso'_?More or less 'Victory has a hundred fathers, but no one wants to claim failure'?"

Hotchner gave a deep and bitter sigh. "Oh, there's always a father. He can hide all he wants, but he's still the daddy, and the DNA will tell."

Now Charpentier better understood what Prisoner had been saying. He'd been using the word _failure_ in a far more negative sense than Norton had realized. He sat quietly for a moment, allowing himself to absorb the layers of meaning that the lawyer intended. He was just about to say something vaguely related to _Who's your daddy_, but the prisoner was suddenly squirming the front of his body against the window.

Norton narrowed his eyes and rose to his feet with all his senses on alert. Had Prisoner managed to create yet another handcuff key?

But, no. The lawyer wrestled the front of his uniform shirt close up against the bar so his fingers could work a facial tissue out of the breast pocket, then bent so he could wipe his eyes and blow his nose. He may have been silent, but his features were twisted and he'd been weeping.

Norton didn't even know he was asking the question until he heard himself say the words. "Who is it that you're crying for, anyway?"

His captive wiped his nose again and seemed to struggle to get control over his breathing. "Hell, fucked if I know," he grumbled, his voice low, rough, and still muffled by a tissue and the angle of his shoulder. "You? Me? Both of us? Neither of us? Does it matter?" 

_There's still some spirit in there. Thank God!_

"I suppose not," Norton said with the beginning of a smile. He reached into his pocket. "Ready for some exercise?"

Prisoner straightened up and deliberately squared his shoulders. "Sure," he said. His voice was still a little too listless for Charpentier, but he'd take what he could get. Norton reached up and fastened the collar around the lawyer's neck.

**~ o ~**

_If he had to compare it to something else in his life, it would be the death of Haley. Seeing that sweet, still body, no light in those enchanting eyes—realizing that all hope was gone that some day he would _say_ or _do_ or _be_ the right thing and could put their marriage back together again—he'd felt as though his internal organs were being run through a shredder. He'd held her corpse and howled like a wild animal, hoping that a loving universe would hear his agony and reverse the flow of time, give him another chance, another shot at saving her. He'd been incapable of speech, barely capable of thought, just one great throbbing nerve ending that screamed _No, this can't be happening!

_If he was good at his job with the BAU—and he was, he knew; not truly gifted, perhaps, but intelligent, ferociously dedicated, and detail-oriented—it was because he would stay up all night, skip meals, do whatever it took to bring down the UNSUB, because once the BAU got the case, every new victim suffered and died on his watch, practically at his hand. The new images that went up on the case boards, the new blank eyes, abused bodies, were in a sense his fault._

_The therapists the Bureau sicced on him seemed to feel that this was a function of having been an abused child, helpless and stressed, not knowing when the next parental tantrum would erupt. That taking responsibility gave him the illusion of control, an illusion that had been more important to his emotional survival than any reassurance of his innocence might have been. He'd said all the right things to dissuade the therapists, the things that would have deflected anyone else, but he hadn't fooled them. They hadn't even had the courtesy to _pretend_ that they were convinced._

…

Now, standing bruised and shattered beside the entrance to his exercise cage (cue _happy little gerbil wheel_ image) he wondered whether he would ever recover from this second dose of guilt. He watched the fussy little man entering the cell with his little hand truck full of food and clean bedding.

Aaron had huddled on his cot for hours after he finally put it all together, hating himself so passionately that his whole body ached. Uncharacteristically, he'd floundered around, looking for someone else to blame: Haley, his parents, his in-laws, Van der Weese, his ethics prof at Georgetown. The stars. Maybe Charpentier and his astrology stuff knew something that made the difference, something that, if he'd only known it, might have put him on alert.

He'd considered killing himself—nothing new; he'd considered it after Haley died, too. In the end, both times, he'd dismissed it as the response of a coward. _Stand up straight,_ his father's voice had echoed in his head. _Take your goddamn medicine, and get on with it._

He looked around—at the pickaxe, at the treadmill, at the horizontal bar—and the only thing of any interest to him at all was the upholstered easy chair. He made an effort: he took off his sweater and jumped for the horizontal bar, but he managed only one pull-up before he didn't so much wear out as—lose interest. He simply couldn't be bothered to make the effort.

He sat down in the easy chair and opened up the cooler. He selected a bottle of white grape juice and listened to see what was playing on the boombox.

Another of those pop covers of the so-called standards: Cher and somebody (Rod Stewart?) doing "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."

_Couldn't sleep and wouldn't sleep until I could sleep where I shouldn't sleep … _

Had the words to that song always been as suggestive as they sounded now? He wished he'd paid more attention to lyrics on a regular basis, but he didn't. Maybe that was why he'd had all of that trouble recreating the words to his favorite songs in high school.

_When I'd been here less than a week. And it felt like forever, and I didn't think that I'd survive a month of captivity. And tomorrow it'll be a hundred days. A third of a year._

"Hey," Warden said, standing beside the bars, "my family wasn't much for communication. I don't know why, but they just weren't comfortable with the whole shared feelings thing. You know what they did when they had to talk about something of significance?"

Aaron blinked and wondered how Warden had sneaked up on him.

_I've lost some time_, he realized. Cher and Rod Stewart were long gone; the Steve Miller Band was singing "Abracadabra" now.

_Think about what he asked you._

"My family just didn't talk," he said. "If something really needed to be said, my father would eventually shout it."

"Waldo was like that, too," Charpentier said, pulling his own armchair up close to the bars. "At least, when the rest of the family wasn't around. When his brothers or sisters came through town, though, there was family conversation."

"All but one of my uncles and aunts lived right there in the Richmond area," Hotchner replied, "or so close that their visits weren't big deals." He thought about that for a few seconds. "I'm sure that there were family conferences, like when my grandfather was dying, but they were never carried out anywhere that I could see them. I don't think my cousins saw them, either."

"My folks played cards," Norton said. "They sat around the kitchen table with a deck of cards and their beer bottles and their cigarettes and cigars and they played these obscure forms of rummy I've never heard of before or since, and somehow things got talked out. It's as if they had to pretend they were doing something else if they wanted to say anything of significance. I would sit right outside the kitchen, where all Tiskie's dollhouses were lined up, and I'd play with my—" He sighed explosively. "What were they called? You marked on the film, then you lifted it to erase what you'd written or drawn."

"Oh, sure," Hotchner said, picturing them, recalling the precise sound the film made when you peeled it upwards. "They're—damn. I don't remember what they're called, either. The Magic-something, probably."

"Anyway," Charpentier said, "I'd sit there with my—whatever it was, drawing dogs and guns and space ships and erasing them, but all the while I was listening to the grownups talking, saying things they never said in front of us kids. Things about wars and pregnancies and who owed whom a bunch of money and who was screwing who over. But they would be playing cards, and nobody looked at anyone else."

Aaron considered that. "I think," he said hesitantly, "that the same thing was going on with my father, but he and his brothers would vanish into the den and shoot pool. I heard a lot of anger coming out of there. I think I sort of assumed that playing pool made you angry, but now that you bring it up, I think that's the way they got stuff talked over. They shot pool and drank and shouted and cussed and—" He shook his head. "No idea why I'm thinking of this."

Norton raised an eyebrow. "Because I raised the subject?"

"Mm, sounds like a reasonable explanation," Aaron said.

Charpentier picked up a folding TV tray, a solid one with strong legs and a wooden surface, and arranged it butting up directly against the bars of the exercise cage. "You ever play cards, Hotchner?"

"Some." He recalled endless hours on the jet, especially homeward bound, hours of poker and hearts and gin and occasionally bridge. He noticed that Warden had called him by name, but as always, he pretended he hadn't heard it.

"Ever play cribbage?"

"Jesus, not for years. I used to play it with my great-uncle on holidays. I think it was his job to keep me distracted so I wasn't constantly running into the kitchen where all the important stuff was going on."

"Where was your dad?"

Suddenly it was as though he were back there. He smelled sage dressing and peppermint and pumpkin pies and Christmas cookies. Heard the clattering and soft laughter in the kitchen, the secret whispers of his much older cousins, all obsessed with members of the opposite sex. He didn't even have to close his eyes to be there. "In the den with his brothers," he said. "Drinking and shooting pool. Cussing and yelling." 

"My grandmother taught me cribbage," Warden said. "Probably for the same reason, to keep me out from underfoot. Tiska was welcome in the kitchen. Not me. Too big, too noisy—too everything. I teach it to the kids I'm helping with remedial math; it gives them a reason to know their basic math facts."

Yes. He recalled now the elegance of the scoring system; it had appealed to the nerd in him, and it had been a social game, impossible to play without conversation. He found that he was grinning. "I don't suppose you have a board there, do you?" he asked.

Norton grinned back at him and reached down into his computer bag. "As a matter of fact, I do," he said. He drew a deck of cards out of its pack. "Cut for deal?"

Aaron picked up half the deck. "Low man deals, right?" He checked the card that showed. It was a jack. "Doesn't look good for me."

Charpentier picked up the same pile, but lower down. "Looks good for me, though," he said, displaying a seven. "How much do you remember?"

Hotchner pushed the sleeves of his sweater up his forearms, leaning forward, ready to play. "I'm fine on scoring, I think," he said. "Six cards, two to the dealer's crib. I may need a little prompting, but I think I'll pick it back up quickly."

On the boombox, AC/DC sang "You Shook Me All Night Long."

Charpentier shuffled several times with his small, precise hands—_and I'm wondering whether that thing about hands and penis sizes is accurate, I need to get real here_—and dealt the first hand.

He remembered that it was rude to pick up one's cards until the dealer picked his up—the same thing applied in bridge and hearts, he recalled. When he did pick them up, he was looking at a five, a six, a seven, two tens, and a king. _Crap, the scoring is one thing. Making tactical decisions is something else._

After staring at them for a few seconds, he realized that it depended on whose crib it was. It was Norton's. _So much for pitching the tens._ He threw Charpentier the six and seven. _Stick with the basics, your fifteens._

He fumbled his way through the first few counts, but eventually fell into the rhythm of the game. Each turn contained three "hands," each consisting of four cards and the same "turn card." The dealer got two hands, one of them the crib, formed from two cards each player contributed.

By the midpoint of Game One—they would play a standard rubber of three—everything had come back to him. They'd fallen into a comfortable rhythm of playing cards and talking, and he was beginning to enjoy himself.

"So how many kids were in your family?" Norton said, then took a last glance at his cards and made his decision. "_Seven_."

"_Seventeen_," Aaron said, laying down a king. "Two kids, just me and my little brother."

"There were three of us," Norton said, laying down another seven. "_Twenty-four for two_. My brother was six years older, then there was my sister and me, but my brother died when we were, ah, about three. I hardly remember him except in photos."

"_Thirty_. What did he die from?"

"_And thirty-one for two_. Ran out into the street, didn't see the car. He was in the hospital for a while, I don't recall how long." Charpentier pegged his points and looked up at Aaron. "I wish I remembered some of this stuff. Sometimes it's hard, not even knowing whether my parents are still alive. It's like part of me's missing."

"_Nine_. What's the advantage to being whoever you are now? The courts gave you back your presumption of innocence, so why not be Norton Charpentier again?"

"_Suit yourself, eighteen for two_. I just can't. There's too much there. I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be a living memory to people who knew me back then."

"_'Suit yourself,' huh? Fine, twenty-seven for six and a go_. What's stopping you from looking them up online?"

Norton sighed heavily. "I just—that person's dead and gone, and if I look them up, he starts to live again."

"Nortie, whatever I did to make him somebody you didn't want to be, I'm sorry. I know that sounds pretty feeble, but—"

Charpentier laughed shortly, bitterly. "What's done is done. I'm happy with my current life, or happier than I ever thought I'd be. I really thought my life would end when Diana died. More than that, I hoped it would."

_Jesus, I called him Nortie._

"I felt pretty much the same way after Haley died. That one was my fault, too." 

"Bullshit. The Reaper was a goddamned maniac. You aren't God. You did everything that you could. Are you gonna count your goddamn hand? 'Cause if you aren't, I have one hell of a muggins lined up."

Right. Claiming points your opponent neglected to count.

"Dream on," Hotchner said. "_Fifteen-two, four, six, pair is eight._ But I didn't do everything that I could. If we'd still been married—"

"_Fifteen-four._ And why were you divorced?"

_Yeah_, Aaron realized as he started explaining the ongoing problems he and Haley had faced in their marriage. _It's easier to talk when you're doing something else. Maybe I should play __cards with the assholes I'm interrogating._

"_Wow, one big pair there,"_ Norton said when he exposed his crib. "While you're shuffling, let me get this out, fresh-baked this morning." He brought a plastic container and a handful of paper napkins from his computer case. "Raspberry coffee cake."

"Looks great."

_I gotta admit: If you're confined to prison for five years, it's good to have a friend._


	38. The Power of Promises

A/N: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. Thank you to everyone who reads, reviews, and lets us know what is and isn't "grabbing" you!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-Eight**

**The Power of Promises**

"_Sh_," Spencer Reid whispered.

"So paranoid," Jessica breathed back, her nails trailing gently down his chest. "He isn't an infant; he sleeps through the night."

He shushed her again and listened carefully through the hum of urban living, the refrigerator, the air conditioning, the computer hard drives. The laughter and tracks from Adele's _19 _that were audible from the house next door.

She was probably right, although it was surely more guilty conscience than paranoia. He had visions of Jack someday, when Aaron Hotchner was home, safe and sound—and he _would_ come home safe and sound; Reid would give his life to ensure that—imagining Jack telling his father, in all innocence, _You know what? I got up to pee in the night and I saw Spensa-Reid and Auntie Jess wrestling under the covers, and you know what? They had no clothes on!_

And how would he explain it to the once-and-future Unit Chief, if that happened? _'It's not my fault; she put the moves on me'? _How about,_ 'See, I had this older-woman kink I didn't even realize I had until she came on to me'? _Or maybe, _'It's pure propinquity; you spend two nights a week at a beautiful woman's house, and eventually stuff just happens'?_

Or, if he were completely accurate: _It was last Sunday, sir, Day 100 of your captivity. It was possibly the bleakest day that the Team's ever known as a family, worse even than Haley's death and seeing you a haunted, shattered man. All day I recalled your impulsive hug when you rescued me from the grave I was digging for myself in Georgia. I remembered the way I felt so safe, so loved, and so valued by this amazing new family I'd become a member of. I dream sometimes of hugging you when we rescue you, and—I needed a hug. Sounds pitiful, right? But I needed human contact, and this time, when Jessica squeezed my arm, stroked my thigh, looked into my eyes that way, I told myself that she was lonely, too, and I gave in._

And that was supposed to fly with Aaron Hotchner? Who'd been absolutely faithful to his wife, before, and even after, their divorce? Who'd expressed no interest even in dating?

Hotch would hate him, he decided. No, never _hate_. But he'd think less of him and have less confidence in his, Spencer Reid's, ability to control himself and make responsible decisions.

He rolled to his left side and looked at the faint glow of moonlight playing across Jessica's breasts and the secret, satisfied smile on her full lips. He wondered, not for the first time, what on earth she saw in him. Not innocence, surely. He was no virgin, and anyone who truly knew him was well aware of it.

He usually spent one or two nights a week with Jack at Jessica's house. It had been three this time: Sunday, Tuesday, and tonight, Friday night. Day 105 of Hotch's captivity.

_He's alone in some cold metal room and I'm naked beside his sister-in-law. Obviously, I don't have quite his level of self-control._

He tried to picture Hotch in bed with Haley. With _anyone_. Although he'd seen him in the early years with his arm around her, nuzzling her face with his own, grinning—he had an amazing, high-candle-power smile—it was as though Aaron Hotchner were his parent. He just couldn't picture him, _you know, doing it_.

_In some ways, I'm impossibly naïve._

And suddenly he recalled some vague things that Rossi and Prentiss had referred to, about dark places in Hotch's past.

"Hey," he said, rearranging the sheets over his lower body, "was Hotch faithful to Haley?"

"When they were together," Jess replied, without hesitation. "At least, Haley always said that he was—how did she put it? _Almost oppressively faithful_, she said."

"How can that be? How can fidelity be oppressive?"

Jessica shrugged and sighed. "I loved Haley, but I didn't always understand her. What I _think_ is that he was kind of overwhelming, possessive." She smiled up at the ceiling. "I remember, when they separated the first time, she was seriously afraid he would, you know, like, stalk her. He's awfully intense, you know, and if I had to choose, _is he more good-looking or more scary-looking,_ I think I'd go with scary. When we talked about him, her code word for him was Sting, like in 'Every Breath You Take,' you know? Then they separated and—he was out there getting intense with these other women, and Haley about flipped out. She'd cry on the phone, she'd say, 'He's doing just fine without me!' and I'd say, 'Well, so are you, girl,' 'cause she was, she'd gone back to school and she had a great job and she was seeing this majorly hot dentist, and she'd say, 'But that's not the point!'"

She giggled. "You should see your face. What's the big surprise?"

"I think I thought like Haley," Reed confessed. "When I heard they'd been separated for a while, I pictured him hanging around under her window, I don't know, kind of pouting, sullen, keeping track of where she was going and what she was doing."

_Because that's how he looked after she filed for divorce—lost, stomped, not seeing anyone. _

What was the difference?

It hit him with the force of a concrete _duh_.

_Jack._

He was being faithful to _Jack_.

**~ o ~**

Mail delivery came early to the Georgetown apartment complex where Penelope Garcia lived. On that Saturday morning, with the Team on stand-down, a still pretty battered-looking JJ Jareau showed up around 9:30, lugging Henry and two gallons of milk. Garcia hugged her and planted a kiss on the sleepy boy's forehead. She grabbed her mail from the wall of lock boxes and relieved JJ of the milk.

"Will we really need that much?" she gasped. They'd planned to do pudding-painting with the toddler, but Garcia had pictured it as a much smaller operation, not quite the industrial level of production that two gallons implied.

"One's for home," JJ replied with a laugh. "The whole's for home, the one-percent is for the painting." She spread a blanket on the floor for Henry and began unpacking the detritus of motherhood from her bags. Garcia dropped the mail on the coffee table and picked up the milk to store it in the refrigerator.

She had the door to the fridge open when she heard JJ cry out, "Pen, get in here!"

She shoved the two jugs in, bags and all, and hurried back to the living room.

JJ had moved one letter away from the rest of the mail. "It got fanned out when I set the diaper bag on the table," she said, all but sputtering in excitement, "and—" She nodded wordlessly, and Garcia knew exactly what she would see. She even knew that it would be a padded envelope, one that included a flash drive. That familiar printing. That familiar return address.

_It's been more than a month. How can it possibly have gotten any worse?_

JJ was already on her cell, notifying everyone, the Team, the techs. After a quick discussion with Morgan, Erin Strauss, too. Finally she called Will, asking him to come by and wrangle Henry.

"I'll put coffee on," Penelope said.

**~ o ~**

"But I thought y'all were on stand-down," Jessica said, just a little more sullenly than Reid would've preferred. She wasn't long out of the shower. She wore shorts, a tube top, flip-flops, and had a towel wrapped, turban-like, about her wet hair.

"It isn't—it's just some new evidence," Spencer told her as he stuffed his wallet, change, keys, and phone into his pockets. _Gun? Nope, t__hat can stay in the safe. _"I'll be back in a couple hours."

She folded her arms across her chest, her eyes wide. "Evidence? You're going in to Quantico for _evidence_? Since when?"

Spencer glanced around the kitchen hurriedly. No Jack; he was still out back with Josh and Eli from his T-ball team. "It's a new letter from Hotch," he said softly. "We need to analyze it. And I'm not going clear to Quantico; just over to Garcia's. You know how important this is."

He had her full attention now. She'd seen the two letters that they'd received; the note that Hotch had written to Jack was still posted on the little shelf in the boy's room, beside framed pictures of his parents.

"Why are you sure that they aren't forgeries?" she asked.

Reid blinked his surprise. "That's an odd question to ask," he said.

"I was talking to Sean a few weeks ago," she said. "I told him I was afraid that they were forgeries. He said you were positive that they were real and that Aaron's still alive."

"We have his fingerprints," Reid told her. "Both letters had his fingerprints on the fronts and backs, over and under his writing."

"I want to come along," Jessica said. "Just let me change tops, and I'll ask Eli's mom to keep an eye on the guys. She won't mind; I watch Eli and his sister at least once a week." 

"You can't," Reid said.

"Because I might see his handwriting?"

"Jess, it's a small apartment, and the whole Team's gonna be there, and a bunch of techs, and—it'll be way too crowded."

She faced him squarely, stubbornly. "I think you have pictures of him," she said.

"Why? What does Sean think?" he asked, one interested eyebrow raised. He recalled confiding to Aaron's younger brother that they had video of Hotch. Had Sean's promise to keep the secret been worthless?

"Sean says that if you say he's alive, he believes you."

"And that isn't good enough for you?" 

"I heard you and Emily and Derek talking one night. You were talking about how he's being starved. I'm no super-genius, but I'm not a dummy, either. If you guys know that he's being starved, then either you have more letters than you're admitting to, or you have pictures."

A fragment of Arthur Miller's play _The Crucible_ came back to him. _There is a promise made in any bed__ … spoke or silent, a promise is surely made…._ He had slept with Jessica Brooks, and there was a promise there. He owed her a somewhat higher level of truth than the average person on the street.

He met her eyes. "There _is_ an image."

"An image." She looked horrified rather than gratified, her knuckles flying to her mouth. "Oh, God, why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you copy it for—" Her voice failed as her intelligence answered her questions. "Oh, God," she repeated, but this time her voice was soft and sad, a fearful whisper. "How bad is it?"

"Not as bad as it could be," he replied, picking his words with infinite care. "He's lost weight, but that could be stress."

"Well?" she prompted. "Come on, I'm not a child, Spence. Talk to me."

And he had no idea what to tell her. "What do you want to know?" he asked.

"Is he—what was he doing? What was he wearing? Is he—marked? Has he been mistreated?"

"He was—dressed," he temporized. "Shirt, pants, sweater. Clean, well-groomed. There's some scarring on his wrists but no evidence of—you know—anything else. He was in his cell. It was small and clean, metal walls. In the background we could see that he had writing implements and books and playing cards. A bed with sheets, blankets and a pillow. Bottled water. Fresh fruit."

One of the problems with being Spencer Reid, Super Genius, was that he was wired to show off his knowledge. It took a considerable effort for him to remember not to let slip anything further. Anything about video. About—anything else.

"Why couldn't you show it to Jack, then?" she asked. "If it's that—that bland, what's the harm?"

Reid just shook his head. "He looked miserable, Jess. Anxious. Lonely. He wouldn't want Jack to see him like that."

**~ o ~**

For the first time, everyone involved was present when Garcia opened the envelope, her hands gloved. She set aside the tiny red flash drive and opened the single folded sheet of paper.

"No computer printing," she reported. "It's all hand-written. Well, printed."

The techies hovered just behind her, ready to seize the document, but first she would read it aloud.

"_My friends, _it starts," she read. "That's new, a salutation. Then one short paragraph. _Both this letter and the enclosed video were created with my full knowledge and cooperation_. _I'm where I should be. I accept my guilt and I'll serve my sentence without further complaint or resistance. Your ongoing messages and pictures keep me strong and lift my spirits. I think of you warmly, constantly, and with deepest gratitude. My very best, Aaron."_

There were a thousand things she wanted to say, wanted to review, but she handed it to Vaughn, who ran a copy and passed it on to Linda, then used the first copy to make ten more for the Team.

"More 'Conjunction Junction' crap," she said at last, as Morgan, Reid, Prentiss, JJ, Rossi, Erin Strauss, and even Will (with Henry at his feet, gnawing on a terrycloth bunny) accepted their copies, "but it sounds a little more like Hotch."

"It does," said Morgan, "but why?"

"Contractions, to start with," Reid answered. "Direct statements, not those progressives we saw in the earlier letters. Active verbs."

"And he's talking about the video, so he knows about it. About our messages. About what he thinks of us," Penelope added. "This is way more personal than the other ones he sent us."

"But it's an ugly message," said Rossi. "He's where he's supposed to be? He accepts his guilt? He's thinks he's just gonna—" He adjusted his reading glasses and read off his copy. "—_serve my sentence without further complaint or resistance_? That's fucking bullshit." He grimaced in the direction of impressionable little Henry. "Sorry."

"Let's get it over with," Jennifer Jareau said. "Will, could you take Henry in the kitchen or the bedroom or something so we can look at what's on the thumb drive?"

He nodded and scooped up the boy. He took a long look at JJ as he left. His voice warm and supportive, he said, "Hey, keep me in the loop, Sugar."

"Promise," JJ said. She was wringing her fingers together on her knee.

"He knows about the video," Emily said. "So—maybe it won't be as creepy as the other one?"

Spencer Reid sighed heavily. "Let's hope not."

Her hands still gloved, Garcia popped the flash drive into one of her laptop ports. She saw that it contained three files. "It's an MP4 this time," she said. "He converted it before he sent it."

"That's important?" Erin Strauss asked.

"Yes, ma'am, that means that if—_when_—we find this Warden creep, we should find traces of the operation on his hard drive," she replied.

"Can you play an MP4 on that machine?"

"Yes, ma'am. Nineteen-point-four meg, one minute, fifty-four seconds in duration. Also two JPGs, they look like—like views of his cell. Want to see them?"

"Not yet," Morgan directed. "Let's see the video."

She copied the contents of the flash drive into an isolated corner of her hard drive, ran three analytical programs on them, ejected the flash drive and passed it on to Linda.

"OK," she said. "Looking virus-free here." She picked up her universal remote, turned on the HD TV, and set up a direct feed from her hard drive to the four-foot screen. "Here we go."

When the image appeared on the screen she could almost feel the oxygen leaving the room as everyone simultaneously drew a deep breath.

He was perhaps four feet from the camera, wearing red scrubs and a navy blue sweater. As before, he was clean-shaven and his hair was neatly trimmed. He sat on his cot with walls to his back and to his left side. Visible behind him, attached to the wall with floral refrigerator magnets, were a few of the photographs the team had sent him, printed out on glossy paper.

But he looked dreadful.

In some ways, he looked worse even than JJ, who'd been blown out the closed window of a Denver Field Office SUV two weeks previously. Numerous facial bruises were just beginning that awkward purple-to-yellow transition that under some lights looks green. His left eyebrow and his lip had been split and both of his cheekbones and his left eye were still swollen.

"It looks as if he and I happened just about the same time," JJ commented. Everyone was probably thinking that, but Penelope was grateful that JJ was the one to say it.

"Done by a right-hander," Rossi observed.

"Hey," Aaron Hotchner said in a low, barely audible voice, but looking directly at the camera. "Sorry about my appearance. I tried to escape a couple weeks ago, and there were—" He offered a faint smile. "—consequences. Anyway." He took a long breath and nodded. _To some other person? To Warden? To a confederate of Warden's?_ "I'm hoping that after I've healed a little more, I can make a video that Jack can see. I'd—prefer that he doesn't see this one."

The voice was still his dark rumble, but it was thin and played out, as though all the spirit had been beaten out of him.

He held up a folded piece of legal paper. Again, that faint, weak smile shone briefly. "I have notes here so I don't forget anything," he said, but they had to rewind it. Nobody caught the words because everyone's attention was focused on his raw hand, wrist, forearm.

His eyes drifted away from the camera several times, and then back. He glanced down at his arm as if just noticing it and said, "Yeah, that was part of the same deal. It was pretty ugly—but it's over now." Again he glanced away and drew a long steadying breath.

_Is that a message? Is he saying, Don't buy this?_

"I know you're wondering about the note, about whether I wrote it under duress, about whether I'm saying whatever I have to say in order to survive. Maybe you're even starting to think in terms of Stockholm Syndrome. Let me be clear on this: I wrote that note of my own volition and just passed it on to my Warden for checking. I'm where I'm supposed to be. I can't give you any details of my—my crime, or crimes, but I'm guilty as charged."

He blotted at his lips with the back of one hand and seemed to hesitate. "I was told when I first came here that acknowledging my guilt would probably be harder for me to bear than the—uh, the measures that the guys who brought me in used to ensure my cooperation. It was the truth, though. Confronting my guilt, my irresponsibility, was a nightmare.

"I can give you no details of it, since that could lead you to the person or persons who first engineered my—incarceration. Please," he said, his voice serious and urgent, and his eyes fixed on the camera, "trust me when I say that I'm guilty as charged and I fully accept my sentence."

Penelope searched his face for signs of deceit, for signs of fear, of compulsion, of sarcasm, of anything other than the solemn statements he was making.

Hotch glanced again at his sheet of yellow paper.

"Um, I saw coverage of the Guffey mess," he said. "I'm glad that the Team made it out of there alive. I hope everybody's on the mend. It kind of pisses me off that Guff used me to create his own little story. I don't know many details, but I'm confident that you nailed him for a phony pretty quickly once you got involved. If you want, and if it doesn't complicate your lives unnecessarily, you can convey my sympathies to the OPR and OKC and Denver agents who were injured, and the families of everyone who didn't make it."

Another glance at his cheat sheet.

"I can't say enough about what your letters, your questions, your pictures mean to me. There are two pictures attached along with the video, one of that wall over there—" He nodded past the camera. "—and this one." He patted the wall behind his cot, the one against which he was leaning his left shoulder. "You may already have seen them.

"When I'm not doing something stupid, I'm treated well," he said. "Cooperation and civility are rewarded here. I get reasonably regular exercise and lately, some social time." He stared intently into the lens. "But please, _please_ believe me, the way to where I'm being held has been booby-trapped. Any unauthorized person who tries to access the area of the cells will trigger explosives, killing themselves and, well, anyone who's here. Including me.

"Thanks for listening. I promise that next time I'll be presentable enough for Jack to see. In the meantime, tell him that I have pictures of him—" He gestured broadly. "—all over my cell. Stay safe, everyone. I miss you and love you. Your messages mean the world to me."

The video ended.

"Holy crap," Emily Prentiss said.

Penelope said nothing at all. What else was there to say? _Holy crap_ pretty much summed it up.


	39. Doubling Down

A/N: Cowritten with my magnificent beta, Esperanta. The only things we created were this creepy little world and a few OCs. We're heading into the end-game next chapter, so there's hope ahead!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Thirty-Nine**

**Doubling Down**

_Four._

_Not good enough._

_Five._

Everything from his neck to his waist was aflame. His biceps shuddered with effort. His legs twitched, wanting to relieve the pressure on his arms. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to do one more pull-up.

_Six. _

He dropped gratefully back to the floor. His gaze rose again to the horizontal bar. _Nailed you, you merciless bastard,_ he thought at it.

His soundtrack for the moment was a bewildering—there was no accounting for Charpentier's tastes, or maybe for where he thought Aaron's tastes might run—LL Cool J, snarling "Mama Said Knock You Out."

_Fine. I knocked out the fucking bar._

He stood there, panting and waiting for the fire to subside in his muscles, until the song was over. By then, Warden was back, moving his chair close to the bars the way he did when they just had relaxed social time.

"Reach your goal?" he asked.

Aaron picked up his sweater from the poured concrete floor and mopped at his dripping face and neck. "Yeah," he sighed with some satisfaction. "Yeah, I did."

It was the afternoon of Saturday, August 28, his 106th day of captivity. Warden had assured him that the letter and video should arrive at Garcia's on this day. He wondered whether the Team was in town or out somewhere on a case. Wondered whether JJ was out of the hospital yet. Wondered what they would think when they saw him, heard him, watched him. Had they received it already? Maybe even opened it? There was little he wouldn't have given just to be a fly on the wall when they opened that letter.

"You've done well," Warden said. "The video, your exercises—everything seems to be coming together for you."

It was certainly a different take on _coming together_ than he'd had a month ago, but, yes, he was as satisfied as he was likely to be, all things considered. For a prisoner. For a man with no name and few hopes.

"Yeah," he said, but his heart wasn't in it. He sat down in his own armchair and opened the cooler. For the second time, carbonated soft drinks were among his choices. He selected a bottle of Sprite and unscrewed the cap.

"And you did a laudable job on the video."

"Thank you, sir," Hotch murmured. He accepted now that it was in his best interests and the Team's for them not to find him. He'd done his best to sow a little misdirection without any outright lying. "I meant everything I said about my own guilt."

"I appreciate that, Prisoner."

There was a sparkle in his captor's eye, and for some reason that frightened him more than any scowl ever could. Something was up, and he couldn't begin to fathom what it might be. "I have a proposition for you."

The man was smiling in an odd way, an excited way. A _pumped_ way. Aaron felt a chill creep up his spine, and for once was glad he didn't have to speak, since he had no idea what to say.

"A special occasion is about to occur, one for which I'm prepared to offer you a gift. Would you like to receive a gift?"

Hotch kept his face devoid of emotion. "That depends, I guess, sir."

"On what?"

"On what the gift is…sir."

Warden's smile widened. "Oh, it's something I know you'll want. Very much, in fact."

_Very much, huh_? Lord, there was so much he wanted and so little he dared to ask for. He recalled some time ago screaming at Warden, demanding that the little guy just kill him already, just put him out of his misery. But…he wouldn't be smiling about that, would he?

Or would he?

Just when life was beginning to make some kind of sense, here he was out on the tightrope again. He reviewed several ways to engage Warden over this so-called gift before coming up with one as careful as it was respectful.

"I trust your judgment, Warden," he said.

"Hmmmpf."

Not a very enthusiastic response to his careful, respectful statement. _Damn, the man was so hard to read!_

Warden leaned back his chair and opened a bottle of Coke. "I seem to recall that once upon a time you demanded communications privileges, 'like any other prisoner,' I believe you said."

"Yes, sir. And you're letting me write and receive mail. I appreciate that, Warden."

The little man beamed. "In honor of this special occasion, I propose to go one better. How would you like to have a visitor?"

_A visitor?_ His heart slammed. _Who? Jack? Jess? A member of his Team? _Emotions flooded through him, from exhilaration to sheer terror, followed quickly by a torrent of questions. "But—but how could I have a visitor? And for how long? And how would they get here and back?"

Charpentier nodded contentedly. "All very good questions, Prisoner. Sensible." He yanked the lever that raised the footrest. "And the first part of the answer is that a visit of two or three hours would seem reasonable given the complexity of the process. However, it will take some assistance from you for this to happen, Prisoner."

Aaron stiffened. "No," he gasped. "You want to abduct somebody else, don't you? I can't do that."

Warden gazed steadily at him and said nothing for a minute or two, then gave that unsettling smile again. "If by 'else,' you mean to imply that I would be adding an additional person to my—my FBI menagerie, then, _no_. Absolutely not. But abduction will be part of the package, Prisoner. You surely don't expect me to issue an engraved invitation with directions and a parking validation."

Aaron shut his eyes and let his inner profiler take over. What should he do? Was this a test, or was Warden serious? Regardless, he would never agree to anything involving Jack or Jess, both of whom were simply off-limits as far as he was concerned. But maybe one of the Team could use the visit to gather intelligence that could be helpful later.

Useful for what, though? He'd come to see that he had indeed wronged Warden, and had accepted his punishment. That meant that theoretically he should no longer harbor thoughts of escape or early release—but he was still a human being…and a father who desperately missed his son.

_This must be a test. Warden's operating on his own and holding down a full-time identity in some other location. There's no way he could take another prisoner, especially if it were for only a few hours._

He shifted his shoulders slowly and carefully and took a long drink of his Sprite. Charpentier continued to study him through the bars, seeming almost giddy with excitement.

OK, so, treat it as the real deal.

And maybe it is, God help me….

He would never select Jessica. For that matter, he would never choose Emily or JJ or Garcia. Norton Charpentier's attitude toward women was invariably gallant and protective. The same reasons eliminated Jack as a "visitor." Warden would never frighten a child.

All right, then: the Team. Of the available males, Morgan was unlikely. Warden had barely managed to capture him, and Morgan was not only far more deadly than Aaron was—he had also certainly spent hours reviewing the security camera footage of his own abduction. There was no chance that Warden would target Morgan. Rossi was also unlikely; although he'd never explicitly said so, Aaron was confident that Warden felt a deep guilt about Van der Weese's death. He was not about to take on another man in his sixties.

_Of course._

Aaron met his captor's gaze evenly. "What guarantees can you give me that Reid won't be injured in the process?"

The hints of surprise followed by an ill-hidden grin told Hotch how accurate his guess had been.

"Part of that will depend on you, of course," Warden said evenly. "If you provide me with accurate information about a suitably safe site for his abduction, then for my part I can guarantee that as with you, he will suffer no more than a jolt from a Taser to render him compliant, and a dose of the same sedative you've received."

"No Enforcer, huh?" He spoke up before he'd even considered the wisdom of it.

Warden's smile was a little bleaker that time. "No—I'm afraid that the Enforcer's become unusable."

_You broke it on my fucking face, didn't you? _That one he had the sense to keep to himself.

Hotch hesitated. Whether Warden was serious or just testing him, his answers mattered. He hated to say anything to Warden about Reid's experience with addiction, but he had to find out if the sedative in question might cause a recurrence—something he could never allow. On the other hand, he couldn't violate Reid's privacy over such a personal matter. Finally he said, "You need to know something about Reid. He has several drug allergies. If he gets the wrong thing, he could die." Keeping his voice even, he added, "I'll need to know what drug you plan to use."

Warden's eyes searched his. "Good try, Prisoner. Why do you really want to know?"

_Damn! Well, it was worth a try. I'm sorry, Reid._Hotch looked away a moment, then back to Warden. "Because it's personal to Reid, and because he could be harmed by the wrong drug."

"Harmed, then, but not killed," Warden said, and Aaron could practically see him working out the problem. "It seems to me, then, that your associate must—how shall I say it?—have addictive tendencies."

Hotch said nothing.

"You have nothing to fear, Prisoner. I won't tell you which drug I'm using, but I can assure you it's non-narcotic. As long as Dr. Reid has no problem with drugs in the benzodiazepine family, he'll be quite safe. After all, you experienced no withdrawal symptoms, did you?"

"Not to the drug," Aaron said quietly.

The little man erupted in a laugh. "'Not to the drug'! That's a good one, Prisoner. As to the withdrawal of your freedom, though…you had exactly the symptoms I intended you to have—and that you deserved."

Aaron showed no amusement. "Yes, sir, I deserved it. But Spencer Reid has done nothing to deserve punishment from you," he said with more passion that he'd intended. "He's a good kid—a man, really. He's been through a lot, but he keeps standing up to the monsters, one day after another."

Warden made a reassuring gesture and opened his mouth, but Hotch discovered (to his own surprise and chagrin) that he wasn't yet done. "It's not that he would be afraid of it," he told the little man in his recliner. "In spite of what he's seen, what he's been through, he hasn't lost his faith in doing the right thing—and his physical courage is almost endless. If he thought that it would produce some good, he would volunteer.

"Which is all the more reason," he concluded sternly, "for me to protect him if I possibly can."

Norton sat very still, running a finger along the outside of his soda bottle, contemplating Hotch with an odd expression on his face. "Noted," he said finally. "Very well. You already have my promise that I will not harm your colleague Dr. Reid in any way, and furthermore, I promise you that I will release him after the visit is over. Well?"

Hotchner glanced away. Fear, worry, and excitement washed over him, making him slightly nauseous. God, how he wanted to see a friendly face, to find out how Jack was, how the Team was doing…but could he trust Warden to keep his promises? He'd never forgive himself if Reid became a fellow prisoner because of his betrayal. So—to trust this man who held his life in his hands, or not?

_Is this for real, or is this a test?_ It was probably a test; Charpentier's life must be stretched nearly to the snapping point already. He could scarcely manage anything as idiotic as this proposed second, temporary, kidnapping. On the other hand, if he failed, it might bring the Team down on him. So far Warden had followed through on everything he'd promised—both good and bad.

_Am I putting the only people in the world I truly care about at risk just to pick up points with my captor?_

At last he sucked in a deep breath, wondering whether somewhere down the line he would look back on this moment as some kind of black turning point in the misery that his life had become. "All right," he whispered. "What do you want from me?"

**~ o ~**

The first order of business on Monday morning, August 30, was the information the techies and the Team had managed to collect from the letter and the video.

Rossi chaired the meeting, since Morgan was up to his elbows in some damn hearing or other, the kind of thing Hotch had done without complaint, half the time not even mentioning that it was something he had to do.

"Fine," Dave said, glaring around the table at Reid, who looked exhausted, at Prentiss, who looked discouraged, and at JJ, who still looked like a victim. Only Penelope Garcia mustered the illusion of energy and spirit. He checked his list—_a cheat sheet, just like Aaron had in the video_—and said, "Let's start with the biggest surprise.

"The letter was mailed from Arlington, Virginia. It was collected in one of seven freestanding mail boxes in one area. We're all over all the traffic cams and security cams and everything else we can find, but it's practically the old-needle-in-the-haystack thing. The son of a bitch was within half a mile of Hotch's house on Thursday afternoon. It's almost too much to hope for that he was on foot and we'll find him on video. More likely he was in one of almost two hundred cars that dropped items to be mailed into the drive-up slots."

"Whatever it was, it wasn't the blue truck," Garcia said. "The truck was all over Metro D.C. before the abduction and it hasn't showed up since. It's probably a little metal cube by now. This guy is crazy prepared."

"Secondly," Rossi continued, "there was a lot of trace of a rare kind of soap, it's—" He turned a page of his notes. "Brunner's Ideal Cold and Hard Water Shaving Soap. They don't make it anymore; it was a little family company in Albany, Georgia, and it went under early last year. It used to come in four fragrances: vanilla, key lime, strawberry. At Christmas they'd offer a gingerbread version. They marketed it mostly to survivalists, campers, Ren-Faire types. War reenactors. People who lived off the grid or enjoyed pretending to do so.

"There were substantial traces of Brunner's vanilla soap on Aaron's hands when he wrote that letter. The stuff was a specialty item and it wasn't cheap. I don't see Warden supplying it to him unless he's literally washing and shaving in water that's cold or loaded with minerals or both. Shaving's obviously important, either to Warden—"

"One of those expectations Hotch mentioned that he had," JJ added.

"Or to Hotch," said Prentiss. "Even with his face all banged up, he's clean-shaven. It might be something he's doing to, you know—maintain his sanity or his sense of self or something. Or it's a way of imposing his own control on some section of his life."

"Does this company still have its sales records?" Reid asked. "Or was it literally a kitchen-sink kind of operation and whoever did it is dead?"

"It was a small operation, exclusively mail-order, but it still has its sales records—on paper. Boxes and boxes of paper." Rossi grinned at Spencer. "The BAU's fastest reader is going to Georgia," he said. "Fly commercial, do the marshal thing. We'll compensate you as needed.

"Sit," he added, as Reid stood up. "We're not done here yet." He checked his sheet again. "We talked about the ambient temperature where he's being held before. The cold and hard water fits in pretty well with being deep underground."

"But he saw the Guffey coverage," JJ protested. "And it was never on the networks. Ever. Not even the takedown. So he has basic cable—CNN and Fox both had brief coverage—or more likely, he has access to an Internet connection."

"Garcia?" Rossi said. "What did your bunch get?"

"Lots," she said, "although I'm not sure how much good it'll do us. The video was made very early on Thursday morning, the twenty-sixth, shortly after midnight. The images of his cell were taken a little earlier, Wednesday night, one at 11:23 and the other at 11:25. The critical thing there is that the video was made right after midnight, and before 4:30 in the afternoon of the same day, someone was in Metro D.C., in Arlington, to mail the letter."

"That fits in perfectly with our assumption that he's likely based in the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania area," Reid said.

"Now, we do have one very interesting little detail," Garcia continued. "When Hotch flashed his 'cheat sheet,' we were able to freeze that image. Most of the time the image was too blurred or distant or it was at the wrong angle, and the three clear images we did manage to get—well, we're also fighting his awful, awful handwriting. But look at this."

She called up an image. Barely legible (considering that it was Hotchner writing) were the words FACE, JACK, GUFF, GUILT, WH SEP, TRAP and PROM. "_Face_ is obvious," she said. "He started out by apologizing for his face. _Jack_ is obvious. So are _Guilt_ and _Trap_, which would be the part about how the way to where he's being kept is booby-trapped. _Prom_ may refer to his intention to make a video for Jack when his face looks better. It might stand for _promise_. And that leaves us with WH SEP. Anyone care to weigh in with an interpretation on that one?"

"Linguistically speaking, WH can refer to any question word," Reid said. "Like _why_ and _where_ and _when_, even _how_'s classed as a WH-word. But I can't relate that to S-E-P, whatever that means. Are you sure that's an **S**? It could be a deformed **A**."

"I'm grateful nobody's suggested that Aaron's inviting someone to the prom," Rossi said dryly. "I've seen Aaron write a W and an H just like that, with the H growing directly out of the right side of the W. I know I have, but I can't quite recall the context."

"S-E-P might be September," Emily said. "A creepy thought, but what if he knows something about something planned in September at the White House?"

"Or a state that starts with a W," said JJ. "Washington. West Virginia. Wisconsin. Wyoming. Probably not West Virginia—"

"Montana," Rossi blurted.

"Montana? Montana doesn't start with a W," JJ said gently.

"No, it was when we were planning that full-out assault on—doesn't matter, point was that Aaron was making notes on our assets and he was using IR for infrared vehicle spotlights and WH for standard white-light spotlights! And he wrote the WH exactly that way."

"So—white something?" said JJ, looking a little excited.

"White supremacists?" Spencer Reid suggested. "Separatists? Militias?"

Garcia looked up from her tablet. "Thirty-six white supremacist/separatist organizations in the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania area. At _least_ thirty-six. And I'll bet a bunch of them are into survivalist shit, so that matches up with the soap."

"Hate crimes," Emily all but shouted. "He never prosecuted any, but he's consulted on a bunch of them since he joined the Bureau!"

"There's a strong neo-Nazi presence in Georgia," said Reid. "Give me someone else on the trip to Albany and we can follow up on that aspect, too."

"Oh, me, me," Emily said. "It sounds like a great lead."

_Damn! Maybe we're finally getting someplace._

**~ o ~**

It was the seventh, the first Tuesday of September, the third week of classes at Hazelhurst College. The sun was high in the midday sky—the first rainless day since they'd returned to classes—and students were scattered all over the lawns in a colorful canvas of cutoffs and bared backs and midriffs and the pervasive odors of sunscreen and a dozen kinds of cologne and deodorant.

His morning lecture had been on facial anatomy. It was a favorite topic for Joe McAfee. For his students—not so much. Some kids seemed positively outraged by his presentation, as though they'd believed that a major in theater somehow gave them a free pass from boring, consistent, "_Sorry, there's just one correct answer, can't get away with a mumble and a little misdirection,"_ stuff like math and science.

_Well, honey, it's all math and science. You. Me. Shakespeare. Spielberg. Kurosawa and Pixar. Mozart and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Coens and the Farrellys. Ibsen and Chekhov and Verdi and Mamet and Mel Brooks. Sing it with me, brothers and sisters:_ We. Are. Math.

"Mr. McAfee?" an adenoidal voice called as he left the Performing Arts building with his mail in one hand and his car keys in the other.

"Yes?" he said, turning. _Oh, good. Already know him, second year._ _Smart kid, a hard worker, with creative potential. Wealthy family, too much hair, but a good heart._ "What's up, Greg?"

"I need two faculty members to sign on for my screenplay project," he said. "I have Ms. Cole already, and now I'm looking for someone a little—" He hesitated. "—a little harder to please, if you know what I mean. Somebody who'll catch the problems, ask the questions that I don't ask because I'm too much in love with my own concepts, you know?"

_Oh, God, he's singing my song, he's speaking my language, he's seducing me just as surely as if he were Katy Perry in a virginal little white sun dress telling me I have a cute ass. Just say no, man!_

"I don't know," he heard himself reply. "What did you have in mind?" He trailed after the boy to a picnic table under an elderly catalpa tree, a table most people shunned because, face it, a catalpa is a messy tree, but the shade was delicious.

"It's all about shadows, about what—was it Pluto who said that what we perceive is like the shadows that the fire casts on the wall of the cave?"

"Plato," McAfee muttered. "Plato."

The boy had the good grace to look embarrassed. "Oh, sure. Shit, right. Plato. So my script has to show the relationship between the perception and the reality, OK?"

_Each generation has to believe that it's discovered something new, that nobody has ever felt this way or loved so deeply or discovered these things about life or_—the man who called himself McAfee nodded encouragement at the boy. "Go on." _It's simultaneously depressing and life-affirming._

"It was like in _Helter-Skelter_," the boy began.

"What? The song? The movie? The book?"

"Book," Greg replied. "My bud was listening to it, you know, it was about the Manson murders and this is the part that got me thinking. See, when the jury was like all locked down and all, the police or whoever used to cut out like these random parts of the newspaper, you know?"

"I'm sorry, you've lost me."

"OK, they were locked up for a long time, not just when they were deciding, but like all the time, you know?"

"Sequestered."

"Right. And they were, like, all day, every day, listening to this stuff, and it was like the whole world to them. Except that a lot of the testimony was this dull shit, repetitive, and nobody outside the court cared about it, you follow me?"

"I think so," McAfee said, barely managing to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

"But the police who guard the jury, they didn't want them to think nobody cared about them and what they were doing, and at the beginning they were always having to cut big pieces out of the paper. Jury wasn't allowed to see any media stuff, right? But when the stuff in the court was boring, the police guys—"

"Bailiffs."

"Yeah, cool, bailiffs. They didn't want the jury to think nobody cared about what they were doing, so they went and cut out random stuff from the newspapers so the jury thought that everybody on the outside was really interested in what was going on—with _what they were doing_, you see. They'd open up their newspapers and they'd think, wow, what we're doing is really important and interesting and, you know, relevant."

"Justice is always relevant."

It was the boy's turn to curb his sarcasm. "I'm sure," he said.

McAfee slapped his palms on the picnic table. "You know what, Greg? I'm going to have to beg off advising you on this thing. I don't think we're on the same page, and I'm dealing with a whole lot of crap in my life right now that's going to make it hard for me to give you the kind of full attention you and your project really deserve."

He stood, stretched, sketched a wave at the startled student, and stalked away.

He'd hated every aspect of being Norton Charpentier except the Diana and Ellie parts. Even the miscarriages, Jason's death, awful as they were, were part of the fabric of his being the husband of Diana Sheehan. Other than for those bits, Nortie could stay dead as long as he was concerned, and good riddance to the fat bastard.

It was a pain in the ass to be officially ten years older than he truly was. It was a bigger pain in the ass to wear the name of a big bullying blowhard of a jerk like the real Joseph McAfee, but he liked his life. He'd always wanted to teach, had always enjoyed the technical side of the theater, and in many ways, his life was great. He liked the kids and he loved being able to pass on a little of his love for numbers, patterns, and logic, to young minds. Joe McAfee's life was perfect.

_Had been_ perfect.

He had persuaded himself for almost twenty years that he could somehow cauterize away the wounds to his psyche caused by his conviction and imprisonment by making those who were responsible suffer.

But it had turned out to be nothing like he had imagined it. It was like being a single parent to a large, calculating, manipulative child—a child who had killed before and likely would kill again, a child who hated him, one whom he should fear, should trust about _thisfar_—but one whom he had learned to respect. To care about. To like.

_I can't live like this much longer._

**~ o ~**

It was Sunday, the twelfth of September. He'd been in this cell for 121 days.

Aaron Hotchner was savoring the luxuries of an impoverished college student. Warden's most recent gift had been a small microwave, and a low set of bookshelves to place it on. Just add bottled water and a package of ramen noodles, and—_poof!_—fucking ambrosia, at least when you compared it to peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches.

He had a bowl now, a couple mugs, two plates, and cutlery. He had a plastic dishpan and a big bottle of Ajax dishwashing liquid and a sponge and dishtowels. He could heat water in the microwave to wash dishes. All of this was just tangential to the reality of the change in his life.

He could heat water in the microwave to shave. To wash his face.

He felt like a human being again.

When he heard the rattle of the elevator, he set aside his half-eaten bowl of chicken ramen noodles and climbed to his feet. He crossed the room and laid his left hand against the wall as though feeling for the vibrations of the elevator landing.

A thunk.

The faint squealing of the scissor-gate that he'd missed when he was first taken, but now recognized automatically.

Warden's voice: "Are you awake?"

"I'm awake," he called back, and backed away from the wall so he'd be easily visible. The cover to the square window slid open and Warden surveyed him for a long moment.

"What's my name?" he said finally.

_Huh? He usually starts with my name, not his. _"Warden, sir."

Charpentier's gaze flickered around the cell, then came to rest again on Aaron. "Let's hear your statements," he said.

_Why hasn't he asked me my name?_ He recalled how, when he was first taken, Charpentier had taken away his name.

Maintaining eye contact, speaking conversationally, and meaning every word—well, all but the bit about conspiracy—he recited his statements.

_Please ask me my name. Please don't turn me into a nonentity again._

"Hands."

_Jesus Christ, I thought he liked what I did on the video. Did he pick up on the WH SEP thing? I can argue that it was more misdirection, but I can't raise the subject if he doesn't._

He didn't think he had it in him to endure any more beatings, any more isolation in the dark.

_Please ask me my name. I'll do anything you want. Say anything you want. Be anything you want._

He presented his arms, accepted the cuffs, and snapped them onto his wrists.

_Please ask me my name._

Warden unlocked the door and wheeled the hand truck into the cell.

_All right, there are resources. He hasn't given up on me._

Warden laid a hand heavily on Aaron's shoulder. "Your cooperation has been stellar, and you've earned a new name: Penitent. As I promised you when we first met, with that status there will be improvements in your living circumstances."

He could barely breathe.

"Thank you," he gasped. "Thank you, Warden."

"What's your name?" Charpentier asked.

The weight of the world rose from his shoulders. "Penitent, sir," he whispered. "Penitent."


	40. Voices from a Distance

A/N: Here we go, heading into the home stretch, the last few chapters! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor! We own nothing but an OC or two and this offbeat little world. Updates are slow at the moment because both of us are battling health issues, both our own and those of our loved ones.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty**

**Voices from a Distance**

"But it's _free_," his Monday afternoon tutoring student Megan insisted, her features dark with frustration. "Look, it says 'twenty percent off our usual deep seventy-percent discount, then, just for today, take off another ten percent at the register!' Twenty plus seventy plus ten is one hundred. One hundred percent off is free."

"I see your logic," Joe McAfee said gently. "And I'm sure that a lot of the other kids read the problem that way, too. But just—relax, take a breath, and let's walk through it together, OK, Megs?"

"It's _a hundred percent_," she grumbled.

"Deep breath?"

She gave a sigh of disgust, rolled her eyes, and took a deep, dramatic breath. Released it explosively. "There."

"Let's start with something simple," he began. "Something that costs $100. How about a new MP3 player?" When the sixth grader nodded, he said, "All right. Now, if the base cost is $100 and the 'regular deep discount' is seventy percent, how much does the player usually cost?"

"Oh. Thirty dollars."

"Great. So far, we're on the same page, Megs." His phone trilled _Kingdom Coming_, the Civil War era song that always heralded a call from Ted or Bren Hawthorne. "Now, it says, twenty percent off. How much is that?"

"Twenty dollars." Her tone made it sound more like _twenty dollars, dummy_.

"Not quite," he said. "Hang on, I have to take this. Hello?"

"Hey," Bren's voice said. "It's been raining nonstop for the last nineteen hours. Just a heads-up, the house is in good shape, but the water's still rising and the county engineers recommended that we relocate the horses. We may be losing the stable. Is there anything you'll want me to move out of your little apartment?"

"Nothing much," he said. "I tend to live out of my gym bag. I have some stuff in the medicine cabinet and some spare clothes in the, ah, the top drawer of the dresser. Some odd bits and pieces in the bedside table. A couple books and maps, they'll be on the table next to the TV chair."

"We'll collect them," Bren assured him.

"Thanks, I appreciate it," he told her, and rang off.

Everything in him demanded that he leave now, and ensure that if the side of the hill washed away, it wouldn't bury his prisoner alive.

But two minutes more shouldn't make a difference.

"Thanks for waiting," he told Megan. "Your problem with that MP3 player is that it doesn't cost $100 anymore. Remember the seventy percent discount?"

"You mean—"

"Exactly."

"So it's twenty percent of $30?" The girl's pencil danced on her tablet. "Six dollars. Easy-peasy."

"So now the MP3 player costs how much?"

"It's $24 now." Her eyes narrowed. "And so the other ten percent, it's another, um, $2.40 at the cash register?" She did the subtraction and looked at her figures. "So it costs $21.60?"

"There ya go," he said, and nudged the girl's shoulder. "Not free, but still a pretty good price, right?"

"I guess," she conceded unhappily. All adolescents are poor losers.

"Listen, Megs, I had something come up, kind of an emergency, and I have to leave early. We'll pick up here next time, OK? You take another look at the rest of the problems; I think you'll find it's just more of that same thing, with the price changing."

"OK, thanks, Mr. McAfee," Megan said. She didn't look the least bit put out at having to quit her tutoring session early.

_Kids._

**~ o ~**

He was having the hospital nightmare again, one he'd had so often that he was beginning to train himself to get free of it. As always, he was restrained in some hospital-like setting—an operating room, an examination room, sometimes just in a hospital bed—and Warden stood over him. Sometimes he wielded a knife like the Reaper's, but more often he was armed with a box cutter or even an X-acto knife. Speaking soothing words, Warden would begin to slice him open in order to remove some new piece of him.

It wasn't a question of pain; it was a question of _ownership_. Anything Charpentier took out of his torso—and it was usually generic and unidentifiable _stuff_, not organs—would become his property. Aaron would strain desperately against his bonds, bullying, bargaining, and begging in his efforts to protect what little mastery he still had over himself.

He was learning to deal with the dream, though. He'd had it so often that he'd conditioned himself to start insisting "Dream, dream," and concentrate on moving his arms. Eventually he'd speak the words aloud and it would awaken him—that, or he'd flail a hand around and knock some picture or list loose from the magnets that fastened them to the wall beside his bed. It would flap and flutter down on top of him. Either way, he'd wake up.

This time, it was his own hoarse voice rasping, "Dream! Dream!" that roused him.

He threw a forearm across his eyes and fought to get his panicked breathing under control. He'd noticed that the dreams seemed to come when he was lying on his back. He suspected that the constant bright lights in the ceiling wells triggered hospital ER and OR memories and his subconscious trotted cooperatively along for the ride. The rest of the symbolism—well, it didn't take a Freudian to untangle it.

Once his pulses and respiration had receded to something more manageable, he rolled to his side and blinked at the clock. It was inching up toward 5:00 PM on Monday, September 13th. He sat up, not even bothering to wrap the bedclothes around himself. He was completely acclimated to the temperature in the cell now—happy to put on a sweater or burrow under the blankets, but not unduly uncomfortable when he was doing neither.

For an instant, he thought, _Oh, it's raining. _He could hear the wind blowing, hear the trees swaying, then he dismissed the notion as just another artifact of his dreams.

_I really miss weather._

He stood up and collected a big ceramic mug, a bottle of water, and a bottle of pineapple juice. He filled the mug a quarter-full of water and stuck it in the microwave. While it heated up, he drank some juice and shuffled through his packets of instant oatmeal, finally deciding on apple-cinnamon. He figured it would be weeks before the novelty, the sheer dizzy sensual pleasure, of eating something other than room-temperature peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches began to get old.

He returned to the sink side of the cell, relieved his bladder, flushed. Turned slightly to his right to run a little sink water over his hands. Dried his hands on the ratty old beach towel that he still hung casually near the commode, although he no longer felt the need to wall it off from view.

Looked at the toilet again. Thought, _Is the water level higher than usual?_

Shook his head.

_Get real, Hotchner._

He dumped instant oatmeal flakes into the hot water and stirred it. Mixed a tablespoon of dried milk with a little more cold water, poured it over the oatmeal. Scattered raisins over its surface. Settled on the bed to savor his dinner.

Infinitely preferable to peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches.

Shortly after he finished his meal, after he washed his dishes and tidied his cell, he realized that he needed to pee again.

_Weird. I didn't drink that much. Oh, well._

He stood up, walked over to the toilet, looked down—_No, the water level _is _higher, I think. Not much, but a little_—took another leak, and flushed.

This time the water level was definitely higher.

_Crud._ And even if he'd had tools, he knew next to nothing about plumbing repairs.

Warden had been gone less than twenty-four hours. He was unlikely to return for at least two or three more days, possibly more. He decided that for the time being, he'd piss in the sink and not use the commode unless it was absolutely necessary.

He sat back down on the cot and opened the box of paperback books that had also been part of his promotion to Penitent. There was a decent variety of fiction and nonfiction—history, sci-fi, technical stuff, thrillers, science, and adventure. He was currently midway through a 1980s science-fiction novel, _Footfall. _The cover art had turned him off—_alien elephants from space! Get real!_—but it had won awards, so he'd given it a shot. Now he was thoroughly sucked into the complexities of the alien civilization, its psychology and its approaches to war, to victory, and to defeat.

Later in the evening, the lights flickered briefly, once, twice—then returned to normal. He glanced up and gasped.

Water was seeping under the door to his cell. This astonished him. Although he knew that the cell wasn't air-tight—otherwise he would have suffocated months ago—if anyone had asked him he probably would have opined that it was pretty waterproof.

He threw the book aside, crossed the room and crouched before the door. The water was as cold as what came out of the sink tap, and dirty, with visible precipitate in it. It was entering the cell with surprising rapidity, considering how very slim the opening was between the door and the floor.

He leaped to his feet and grabbed both of the shabby old beach towels. He wrapped them in a plastic trash bag the long way, twisted it into a rope-like shape, then jammed it up tightly against the bottom of the door. After a moment's consideration, he turned the straight-back chair on its side and wedged it between the door and the book case to hold the towels in place.

_Jesus._

He stood there in the center of his little cell, panting, and realized that there _was_ a sound out there, low-pitched, almost subliminal. A groaning or a roaring, hard to tell because it was so very deep. He'd interpreted it as weather, the way the trees swayed and the walls of his childhood home had creaked in a storm.

He leaned against the wall next to the window and now believed that he could hear water running, could hear something creaking, protesting.

The lights flickered again repeatedly.

Hairs stood up on the back of his neck. _No, I can handle a lot, but not in the dark. Shit!_

The water level in the toilet was definitely closer to the seat. Maybe. Or maybe he was just paranoid.

He strained to recall the little bit of conversation he'd had with Warden about plumbing. Norton had advised him against trying to plug up the toilet. Whatever kludge enabled it to flush in spite of being deep underground was delicate, easily overwhelmed, but would serve him well, _"God willin' and the crick don't rise, _like they say_," _Norton had said cheerfully. It meant nothing, right? It was one of those folksy expressions, right?

_Think._

_OK, first: Light._ If the power went out, he would need light.

He gathered the box of candles, the matches, the butane lighter—also marks of his Penitent status—and piled them on the bed. He gathered up every single pair of sweat socks, all eight of them, and placed them on the bed, along with all of his towels. If he had to walk through water, he would do it barefoot, then dry his feet and replace the socks.

After a few minutes, he had a little survival nest created for himself on his cot, with all the towels, blankets, clothing, water and non-perishable food at the foot of the bed, and the candles, matches, and books on the bookshelves beside the bed. If the power went out, the microwave was useless anyway, so he shoved it far over to the other end of the shelf. He heated the bases of three candles and secured them to a saucer, a bowl, and a mug. Now he was prepared to wait out whatever fresh hell that his life was about to dump on him.

If the water got up to the level of his cot, he was fucked anyway. There was nowhere to go, no higher point in the room.

There was a creak, a loud creak, a deep groan that he felt to the base of his spine, as if the cell itself were trembling. The lights flickered one last time, then died away.

Before he could even reach for a candle, a wave of _something_ washed over him, shook him fiercely, screamed and roared—

_Holy shit, holy shit, the bombs, the booby-traps in the elevator!_

—and he heard a howl like a freight train and he knew that it was sound of water and earth thundering down the elevator shaft and into the bunker where the cell was situated.

Any chance that Warden might reach him was now lost.

"I'm so sorry, Jack," he whispered.

**~ o ~**

Hours passed, and still water and debris roared down into the bunker. It was huge, extending in three directions far beyond the area that Warden or the militants or somebody had wired for lighting, so it would surely take a long while for the place to fill up.

There was literally nothing he could do, either to save himself or to hurry matters along. The water would rise eventually, and he would die. He removed his socks, waded through the now ankle-deep water, and located a permanent marker.

After he had dried his feet and put on his socks again, he cleared all the photos and lists from his wall. By the light of his three candles, he carefully printed a last message on the wall behind him to a world that might never see it.

14 SEPTEMBER 2010, 00:22 HOURS  
>MY NAME IS AARON B. HOTCHNER<br>I WANTED TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE  
>I WANTED TO PROTECT THE HELPLESS<br>AND DEFEND LIFE'S VICTIMS  
>I LOVED MY WIFE AND MY SON<br>I HAVE NO REGRETS

Then, because there was nothing left to do but wait, he wrapped himself in blankets, inclined his head close to where the candles flickered, and continued to read _Footfall_.

More time passed. Sometimes something large, heavy, would land at the base of the elevator with a bone-jarring thud, and the pitch of the water-and-debris-fall would change slightly. He half expected the rate of water seeping in to increase or decrease with whatever changes had been wrought there, but he was no longer a dependable judge of how fast the water entered the cell.

He wasn't sure he even cared.

Once, he thought he heard Warden's familiar "Are you awake?" call. His heart had surged, but even though he sloshed across the cell, socks and all, and pressed his face to the wall, even though he held his breath as long as he could, there was no repetition.

He had imagined it.

The water was so frigid that it stung his feet. He peeled off the wet sweat socks and rubbed his feet briskly with one of the towels, then pulled on another pair. It was likely, he realized, that he wouldn't drown. The water was brutally cold; he'd die of hypothermia long before his head was underwater.

That was OK. In a way he preferred it to drowning, although he wasn't sure why. Some forms of death creeped him out—hanging, suffocation, drowning—more than others. Maybe it was because he habitually faced death by shooting or stabbing that he'd managed to demystify those methods, at least to the point that they no longer horrified him.

Some trick of the rushing water again sounded like a human voice. "Can you hear me?" it seemed to be calling.

He set aside his paperback novel, exposed his left arm, shoved the sleeve of his sweater up high, and reached down into the water. He raised his hand and studied the length of his forearm. About nine inches.

"Are you there?" Warden's voice screamed, with an almost hysterical note to it. "Goddamn it, can you hear me?"

_Not my imagination!_

His heart leaping wildly, he shouted, "Yes! Yes! I'm awake, I'm here!"

"Almost there!" the voice yelled, possibly from closer. "How deep is the water in there?"

"Nine or ten inches!" he yelled back. _I'm dreaming this. Maybe it's the beginning of hypothermia._

"It's over my knees, and it's running hard," Warden called. "It's slow going, but I'm on my way! Pack up all of your blankets and towels, roll them up tight, and keep talking to me!"

_A hallucination wouldn't want me to keep talking, would it? Hallucinations don't have plans of action._

"All right!" he bellowed back, rising up onto his knees and beginning to organize the linens.

"Do you have any trash bags left?"

"Two!"

"Good—wrap the blankets in the trash bags; we'll need them on the way out of here. How are you, otherwise?" Warden called, now clearly identifiable and close to the door. His voice was ragged, stressed. "You in good condition?"

"Yes!"

Warden pounded on the wall the way he so often had over the months of his captivity, only he didn't call_ Are you awake?_ The little window slid open, and the rushing air snuffed two of the three candles. Fortunately, Warden shone a heavy flashlight past the red bar. "Come on," he said. "I need you to hold the damn light."

Hotchner gritted his teeth and planted his feet in the frigid water—_God, it stings__!_—and took the five steps necessary to bring him to the window.

"Here," Norton panted. "Aim it downward."

Aaron reached his left arm through the window and grabbed the handle of the heavy-duty flashlight from Warden's fingers, directing the beam toward the floor outside the cell.

"How did you get down here?" he asked. "The elevator blew up."

"There's—stairs and a ladder—rough going—but still pretty steady," Warden panted, his head bent as he did something below the window.

_I could whack him on the head_, he thought, as Charpentier bent over. His hair was plastered to his head and his face was unshaven. He wore a wet tan cotton jacket, with a padded black mesh strap slung on his left shoulder. _I could knock him senseless—but how would I get out?_

"Son of a—" Norton growled. "Goddamn fucking—there it is." He yanked at something twice, three times, then straightened. "Give me the flashlight," he commanded as he wrapped his own fingers around the red bar. "Now push. Push on the goddamn thing. Supposed to come out, dammit."

Charpentier yanked and Hotchner put his shoulder into shoving against the red bar, the bar he'd hated, the bar he'd been chained to every time Warden visited. After a moment, the bar loosened and fell out of the frame, landing with a splash and a faint clunk.

"Get the blankets," Warden commanded. "Towels, candles, maybe a couple sandwiches. It's a long haul out of here. And some of your laundry line—when you're out, you'll want to tie them to your back or something. Got them?"

Hotchner groped around in the corner for food and clothing, then located leftover pieces of cord while Warden played the beam of the light back and forth. His fingers were stiff and unresponsive, and part of him still suspected that this was some vision, and he was going to return to consciousness soon. What he collected, he stuffed into the last of the plastic trash bags. "Got them," he said finally.

"Give everything to me."

He handed his last hopes of staying warm through the window to his captor.

"Fine, now you come on through," Norton said, setting the bundles and the flashlight to the side on the little table beneath the window so it illuminated the lower half of his body. "It's about twenty-one inches diagonally. It'll be tight, but you should be able to squeeze through."

Aaron retrieved the straight-back chair, righted it, and climbed up on its seat. "You're sure?"

"It's just math, Hotchner. It's a fucking _hypotenuse_. Come on, move it."

No _Prisoner_. No _Penitent_. And Warden didn't usually curse.

He bent, poked his head through the window, and hunched his shoulders, twisting as well as he could, aiming for the diagonal.

_Crap. That won't work._

He tried again, this time thrusting his arms out first, tight around his head as though he were trying to dive. Nortie gripped his hands and pulled. Slowly, painfully, Aaron slithered through the window. When he got to his hips, he realized that he had nowhere to fall except straight down on his head.

Charpentier bent over. "On me," he directed.

Hotch wrapped his arms around Warden's waist and let the little man drag him the rest of the way through the window, scraping skin off his sides and dragging his pants down off his hips. Neither man had adequately thought through the whole angle thing, and Aaron landed hard on his hands and knees in what had to be two feet of water. His thin cotton trousers were completely drenched. He climbed to his feet, gasping and shivering, fighting a current as powerful as it was cold. He pulled up his pants and retied the drawstring.

"Doesn't matter," Norton said as he recovered the flashlight. He had a cheap gym bag over his shoulder and a piece of nylon rope tied around his waist. "You're gonna be soaked to the skin no matter what the fuck you do." He untied the rope around his waist and measured off a few more feet of it. "Here," he said.

Meekly, automatically, Aaron extended his hands.

"No, you twat!" Charpentier snarled. "Around your _waist_. So if you fall I don't lose you. This is how we find our way out."

Mollified, slightly embarrassed, Hotchner attached the rope around his midsection.

Warden picked up the loose end and tied it around his own waist. "If we fall down, there's no way to get a sense of direction," he yelled over the roar of the waterfall. "This is our lifeline." He dug around in the gym bag and pulled out a second flashlight. "Let's go," he said, as Aaron found the power switch and turned it on. He jerked his head over toward the distant side of the open bunker area, the part always shrouded in darkness. "We have to get to someplace dry pretty soon to warm up or we won't make it the rest of the way."


	41. Some Random Wacko

A/N: Here we go, heading into the home stretch, the last few chapters! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor! We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world. Updates are slow at the moment because both of us are battling health issues, both our own and those of our loved ones.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-One**

**Some Random Wacko**

"Good thing we don't have pets," Ted said from the storage room shortly after midnight on the fifteenth of September. They were working by the light of eight strategically deployed oil lamps, since they'd lost their power the day before.

"Yeah," Bren Hawthorne agreed, and neither of them thought it the least bit odd that they didn't count the horses. Horses weren't pets. Horses, in a pinch, could help you get out of a flooding situation. No cats or dogs or hamsters or zebra fish were likely to do that. They had a friend on the next ridge over who was frantically trying to collect eight dogs and better than two dozen cats.

Literal flooding wasn't actually a problem for them, up here, high in the Appalachians. Water, after all, ran downwards. The people down in the valleys, they were hurtin' for certain, like Ted would say, but the Hawthornes would ride it out without incident. Sure, their basement was a mess at the moment, sixteen inches and rising, but the pumps continued to make slow progress and in the end they would win the battle. The problem where they lived was shifting earth and mudslides.

They'd already lost the stables that had stood at the far end of their property. Bren had been looking out the back window when it happened. They'd cut off power to the building already and had shut off Joe McAfee's generator—unnecessary, since the horses had already been moved—and the only evidence that there was a building beyond the orchard at all had been the battery-operated emergency light that glowed above the main door. Ted hadn't bothered to climb up and remove that one.

The second of the four storms that had marched through the area so far had been raging as she watched, then she had felt the floor shudder slightly. She had murmured, "Oh, my," and wondered if the engineers had been wrong, if maybe the house was at risk, too, but instead she had watched the unblinking emergency light slowly shift to her left and then slide out of sight, taking the vegetable garden and the back two rows of the orchard with it.

The whole process had happened remarkably quietly, considering its violence, or maybe the storm had masked the sound of it.

She snapped open a cardboard carton on the dining room table and began filling it with canned goods. "Are there any kid-friendly cereals in there?" she called to her husband.

"If by kid-friendly, you mean sugar-saturated," Ted growled back, "you're S.O.L. There are some boxes back here with cartoon characters on them, though."

"I doubt that a cartoon character's likely to fool a cranky toddler," she replied. "It certainly wouldn't have fooled me."

They had volunteered to gather some food and bedding for the rec center, where those who'd been evacuated from their homes—in low-lying areas, or where mudslides continued to pose a major threat—were being gathered in temporary housing.

Ted's phone went off then, so she continued arranging cans of peaches, pears, and fruit salad in the carton.

"That was Bobbie Ann," Ted said after a minute. "She's looking for feminine hygiene items, Pull-ups for toddlers, and those old-lady piss-pads."

She glared. "I'm sure she didn't phrase it quite that way."

"Probably not, but you sure knew what I meant, right?"

"Jerk."

She closed the flap of the carton and scribbled "canned fruits" on its top.

When she was done, she jogged upstairs with a flashlight and found an unopened package of absorbent pads for "feminine leakage" under the bathroom sink. _Old-lady piss-pads, my ass._

Ted's phone rang again.

She wondered whether she should stay upstairs and see what else Bobbie Ann wanted them to bring, but in the end she came downstairs anyway.

"No, we're hanging in there just fine," Ted was saying into his phone. "This is old stuff to us, and I swear to God, Bren grew up in Flood World. Nothing rocks her; she just gets it done, you know?"

He was right, of course. At the age of thirteen, she had helped volunteers pull the bodies of the drowned from the river. She'd been tall and smart and unflappable, with a deep voice and a mature attitude. They'd just assumed she was an adult. Life just kept throwing disasters at her, and she kept rolling up her sleeves and getting on with it.

"Yeah, we're heading out in about fifteen minutes," Ted continued. "We have some stuff to drop at the rec—they're setting up a kind of halfass refugee center there; Jed and Lincoln have the EMS truck there, and—what?" He laughed. "Everything that's critical, irreplaceable, it's either in our lockbox at the bank or we have it in the trunk already, just in case. And we're not spending the night. Yeah, engineers say we're OK, but, hell, they're only _civil_ engineers."

_Ah._ Ted had to be talking to one of his brothers. Ed was an electrical engineer, Hal was a chemical engineer, and Ted, of course, was a mechanical engineer. For reasons that eluded her, they heaped scorn on civil engineers.

"Yeah, dropping off the stuff at the rec and we're driving on into the city, gonna stay with Lou and Tina—hey, I have another call coming in, got to take this, you take care, OK?"

Bren Hawthorne returned to the dining room, where Ted stood, frowning into his phone. "I know what you're saying," he said, then glanced at Bren. "I'll check in the trunk, just hang on for a second." He grinned at Bren and patted two new boxes on the tabletop. "Cereal," he said. "Bedding. I'll be in in a jiffy to load them into the car."

He and his cell phone headed out the side door, leaving her to mark the boxes and to start staging them near the door.

This latest storm, the fourth and they hoped the last, was the big brother to its predecessors. The thunder, growing ever closer, was sustained, and the lightning was "coming in six-packs," as Ted would say. If they'd still had power, she would have been checking the mantles and the oil levels on the lamps. Instead, she walked through the house in an orderly pattern and extinguished each lamp in turn until there was just the one left, directly beside the door they would be exiting through.

Several times the lightning illuminated the whole downstairs with an eerie, blinding white light that their daughter, their only child, had insisted was proof of an alien attack when she was young.

She sat down in the chair beside the last oil lamp and closed her eyes.

After a few minutes, she heard Ted thumping up the steps. He shoved the door open and panted, "Bren, you have to come with me, now. Get your poncho and your flashlight."

She stood up quickly—Ted rarely sounded urgent; he was remarkably laid-back—and grabbed her poncho from over the chair where she'd draped it when she came in. Ted crossed over to the hall closet and grabbed a second poncho, the old yellow one, from its hanger.

She shrugged into the poncho, picked up the heavy-duty flashlight she'd taken upstairs with her, and followed Ted out into the gravel driveway. Rain thundered down on her hood and her shoulders, and the wind drove the storm practically into her face. Even the beams of Ted's and her flashlights were inadequate beyond a few feet away.

To her surprise, he didn't lead her to their sedan—the truck and the trailer were still at the Cromwells', where they'd stabled the horses temporarily—but past it, down the driveway, and then off to the side, through the rose garden and through the nasturtium beds to the gently sloping wooded hill that marked the northern edge of their property.

He played the beam of his flashlight back and forth for a while. She joined him and yelled "What's up?" above the storm.

"There," he called eventually. "Saw it when the lightning flashed. Come on!"

The decline was steep and the wet grass slippery, so she placed her feet carefully, trailing Ted through the deluge, down the hill and into the trees.

"There!" he shouted again. "See it?"

She aimed her own flashlight at the same area and gasped.

Entangled in the exposed roots of a dead fall was the form of a man, gaunt and pale, in the tattered remnants of what looked like surgical scrubs. As she stared in horror, one of his legs moved.

_A trick of the light,_ she thought. _Or the wind._

But, no. His head rolled to one side, then rose back up, apparently following the light source.

_He's alive!_

"Dear God," she breathed, and lunged forward with Ted trailing along in her wake. She slipped about two-thirds of the way and slid gracelessly on her side to within a foot or two of the tangle of dead trees.

"Are you all right?" she asked the man, pointlessly. Obviously there was nothing _all right_ about him. It didn't matter anyway, because he didn't respond.

He was shivering violently, she could see now, his arms drawn inward in a futile attempt to protect what little body heat he had left. A jagged piece of protruding root had penetrated the remnants of his cotton scrubs at the neckline, effectively dangling the man by the shirt so he could neither move nor pull himself free. His teeth were chattering and his eyes were open but unfocused.

He looked, she realized, exactly like the dead flood victims they had pulled from the river, his corpse-pale limbs a mass of bruises and lacerations from water-borne debris—but that kind of thing happened in flood-swollen rivers and streams, in lowlands; not here, not within a few feet of the crest of Blue Bauman Mountain. This man had spent significant time fighting swift-running currents that carried the wreckage of trees and buildings. It made no damned sense, like the "scuba diver found in the treetops" of legend.

But regardless of how bizarre it might be, he was there, he was alive (if just barely) and he was conscious.

Without even discussing it, she and Ted worked together to lift the man so Ted could free his shirt from the piece of root. Once he was free, Ted lowered him more or less into Bren's lap and threw the extra poncho over him. Then he told her that he would bring the car closer and started back up the hill.

She draped the extra poncho so it covered both of them and bent down beneath it—but who is he? A lost tourist? A random mountain man? An ax murderer conveniently frustrated just short of their house?—and leaned her face close to his ear, the way she did when she needed to talk to Ted before he had his hearing aid in.

Although he was still shaking uncontrollably, he was already turning slightly, orienting his body so his head and chest were closest to her own body. She unclasped the front of her poncho as though she were a nursing mother and helped him shift his shoulders.

"You'll be all right," she said into his ear. "My husband's gone for the car. We'll take you where you can get help."

His head moved slightly. He made a faint mewling sound and burrowed still closer to her. She had thought that he was in the second stage of hypothermia; now she wondered whether he was in the third. Granted, it wasn't classical burrowing behavior—there was every reason for him to come as close as possible to a heat source—but she'd expected him at the very least to say something, chattering teeth or not.

It was always possible that he was second stage of hypothermia complicated by exhaustion—anyone who'd conquered flood waters, then decided to climb a mountain in a heavy downpour with high winds could reasonably be exhausted as well as freezing to death. It might even have been the irrationality of hypothermia that had motivated him to climb Blue Bauman. Or he might be a cave-dwelling wacko; the area was riddled with caves and abandoned mines (one of the reasons the ground was unstable), and Lord knew central Pennsylvania had more than its share of solitary nut-jobs. It might even explain the battering—caves and the old mines were subject to flooding, and heaven alone knew what mischief the mudslide that had taken the stable had inflicted on the honeycombed underground world.

He seemed at last to be trying to talk, but when she bent her own ear down to his lips, all he was managing through the shivers were random sounds—hardly even syllables. _Muh. Guh. Mm._

The edge of the poncho rose and light streamed in. Ted was there, and holding one of the two Colemans they kept for emergencies.

Mountain Man first flinched, then tried to turn toward the source of both heat and light.

Ted reached in a gnarled hand and smoothed the man's hair. "Easy, there, son," he said in that sweetly authoritative voice Bren had loved since Day One. "Easy there. You'll be fine; we're gonna get you some help, OK?"

Mountain Man tried to nod. His lips moved.

_Muh._

"Right," Ted said. "You just hang on for a minute." He peered at Bren. "Got the boxes loaded in and I put out the last lamp," he told her. "Gonna grab the sledge from the shed."

She nodded. The sledge had history. It was about one-hundred-seventy years old, supple and well oiled, and crafted of willow. It predated the Civil War. They used it during re-enactments, and Joe McAfee sometimes hitched it up to Burley when he cleared brush for them or when he moved things to and from the stables.

_His hair,_ she realized, touching his temple and the back of his head. He didn't have mountain nut-job hair. He had the hair of a middle-aged professional, and although his face was stubbled, a reasonably hairy guy could raise that much whiskering in twenty-four hours. So—if a mountain man, not the standard model. She raised one of his hands.

Battered, yes, but manicured. Cared-for. Could be a banker. A lawyer.

Could even, she realized belatedly, be a doctor. She wasn't positive, but she thought that particular shade of magenta was worn in the radiology department at the local hospital. It was hard to tell since things didn't look the same when they were wet.

She rolled him just slightly away from her so she could search for an ID. She could find none, neither clipped to his clothing nor tucked into a pocket.

He had nothing in his pockets—no ID, no keys, no cell phone, no billfold—which tended to harmonize with the medical model. The daughter of one of their neighbors worked in the radiology department there. She kept everything but her ID in her hospital locker, secured with a combination lock.

"Do you work at St. Vee Central?" she asked the man on her lap, using the local shorthand for the hospital's name.

His lips moved but nothing came out.

By then, Ted was back with the sledge. Carefully, continuing to hold the poncho over him to protect him from the worst of the thunderstorm, they transferred him to the sledge and dragged him up the hill to the car.

She drove to the rec center, and Ted sat in the back seat with their passenger, whom he had swathed in blankets. From time to time she heard Ted talking to the man in a soothing tone, calling him Son, and evidently the man was becoming alert enough to reply.

When they got to the rec center, Bren pulled up to the door and Ted signaled for Bobbie Ann and the EMS guys, while Bren opened the trunk so others could unload the supplies.

She was surprised to discover that their mystery man was now completely unconscious, and being strapped to a gurney. Ted handed a scrap of paper to Bobbie Ann, and Bren heard him say, "He kept repeating these numbers, I think maybe it's a phone number?"

That was her Ted, all about the details and getting it right.

**~ o ~**

Derek Morgan's eyes flickered to the clock—2:29, it read—at the same time that his hand reached for his cell phone.

He didn't recognize the number, nor the 814 area code, but he cleared his throat and said, "Agent Morgan."

Reception was crappy, but it was some chick named Roberta Somebody in a small town in Pennsylvania.

"We're experiencing serious flooding here, sir," she said, "and one of the victims we recently rescued wanted us to call this number. You said you're an agent?"

"Supervisory Special Agent Derek Morgan, FBI," he replied, thinking, _Somebody gave you the wrong number, honey._

"He's unconscious," she said, "so I can't double-check and make sure it's the right number. He doesn't have any ID on him—"

Bells rang in Morgan's head and he sat bolt upright. "Start again from the beginning," he directed her.

"Fine. We're doing rescue work here," the woman said. "The flooding, you know?"

He didn't, but he made an encouraging sound.

"We picked up a survivor, very weak, disoriented, and he couldn't identify himself. When he did have a semi-lucid moment, he recited this number. He did it twice, so—"

"Describe him."

"Ah, he's an older white male, forty to fifty, tall and thin, dark hair, brown eyes—"

_Thank you, Jesus!_

"What's his condition?"

"I can't be sure on that, sir; he's being transferred to a medical facility as we speak. He was weak and confused and—"

"Injuries?"

"I'm not a medical professional, sir, but I didn't see anything other than superficial scrapes and bruises, similar to what we're seeing on other victims—"

"Victims of what?"

"The flooding, sir?" she prompted, probably wondering how much she could say before he interrupted her again.

_Flooding._

All the scenarios they had envisioned for finding Aaron Hotchner, and not a one of them had involved a freaking flood!

"You said he was weak and confused."

"Yes, sir, according to the people who brought him in. That's common in this kind of situation. Many of our casualties are suffering more from exhaustion and exposure than from more obvious injuries. Confusion, disorientation, memory loss, these are all common to hypothermia—"

"So he's just—"

It was her turn to interrupt. "Sir, I'm telling you what's common in my experience. I have no medical standing to diagnose the man in question. He was unconscious by the time he was brought in here."

"Are you on a cell? Can you send me a picture?"

"Of course, we document everyone who comes in without identification—"

Within a minute he was cradling his cellphone in his hands like a newborn, gazing with utter disbelief at the face of Aaron Hotchner in repose, bruised and battered, but clearly identifiable as himself.

Morgan surged out of bed, the phone pressed to his face. "His name is Aaron Hotchner," he told the woman, and spelled it for her. "DOB eleven, oh-two, one-nine-six-five. He's a senior FBI agent, abducted in the spring of this year." He snatched up a pen. "Give me your fax line, your contact numbers; we'll get a team and all the relevant documentation to you ASAP."

**~ o ~**

_Nothing left._

_No reserves._

Not sure why those words danced in his head, vibrated up and down his body, or what made them important.

Every fiber of every muscle in his body ached, _burned_, and yet he could not stop shivering. He was bound horizontally to something that seemed soft and yielding, but it vibrated and bounced and sometimes jerked unexpectedly. Noises and smells nauseated him, constant thrumming and jangling and over it all a man's voice—_do I know that voice?—_its tone calm, laconic, speaking numbers like an arcane chant. _Do they use mathematics in voodoo spells?_

He wanted to breathe but couldn't, something with hard edges was pushing against his nose and mouth and when he tried to toss his head, to break free, strong hands held him motionless. He tried to fight their grip, but he had no strength left.

_Nothing left._

He recalled falling through a brown and gray vision of hell where the ground ran with a mind of its own and the trees jutted out at crazy angles without logic or purpose and he needed to keep going, just take one more step and then another and then another, and then suddenly there was—nothing left. Not a drop of energy left in his body to move one limb one more inch.

_No reserves._

Like a marionette he had dangled in the crazy brown angles and something snipped the last of his strings and he had fallen, his body just giving up, collapsing with a quiet splash into a heap of random flesh and bones, without ligaments, without sinew, without hope….

_Help me!_

Purple flashes exploded before his eyes and inside his head and he could see them, could see and hear the purple fireworks, even the ones behind his eyes, and he couldn't stop shaking.

_No reserves._

"You keep that on," a voice from a thousand miles away thundered at him, and the hard edges of that thing over his face shifted. "We're almost there."

_There_, he thought, and he wondered why being _there_ terrified him.

The thundering ceased and the—whatever this thing was that he was restrained upon shifted with a clank and a ratcheting sound. He shifted and his sense of balance vanished. He teetered and fell, his arms flailing frantically, uselessly against his bonds in the startle reflex of infancy…but the falling movement was caught, defeated, at the last moment.

The board that held his body shuddered twice with loud metallic protests—_thunk, thunk_—as gravity returned. He was again grounded, but now he was rushing along, vibrating madly to the sound of rubber whispering against concrete. The warm and closed world gave way again to the cold and open one.

The hard thing that covered his mouth and nose shifted again.

A freshet of damp wind, the hum of electronics, and once more the world narrowed. The air warmed and stilled.

"Unidentified male," a voice said, followed by more meaningless numbers.

"He's been identified," another voice said, female, tired. Hands fumbled his left arm out from his restraints. Something thin and plastic—zip cuffs?—was wrapped around his wrist. Fingers groped for and found his.

"Aaron," the female voice said, first gently, then firmly. "Aaron? Can you hear me? Open your eyes, Aaron, look at me. Aaron?"

_Is that me?_

He struggled to obey.

Dark black face, bright lights glinting off of wire-rimmed granny glasses, _what big teeth you have, grandmother_, and bright blue scrubs, _you must be another Prisoner_…but the effort of keeping his eyelids raised was more than he could sustain. He let them flutter shut and slid back into the comforting darkness, letting the abyss swallow him whole.

_It's just the hospital dream again…._


	42. A Bouquet of Conversations

A/N: Here we are, in the home stretch, the last few chapters! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor! We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world. We continue battling health issues, both our own and those of our loved ones, but we're really pumped about seeing this through to its conclusion.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much! We cannot express adequately how tickled we are when people have read our story carefully enough that they've picked up the clues about what would happen next. We're delighted and honored and thrilled by your kindness and enthusiasm!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-Two**

**A Bouquet of Conversations**

**2:54 AM**

Rossi blinked unhappily and reached for his phone. "Yeah?" he croaked.

"He's safe, Dave," the voice of Derek Morgan announced, and Rossi didn't feel even an instant's confusion. He knew exactly who Morgan was referring to. "He's in a hospital in middle-of-nowhere central Pennsylvania, just confirmed by fingerprints. Alive, safe. Wheels up at six."

Rossi sat up on one elbow. "What kind of condition is he in?"

"Unclear," Morgan replied. "We're in communication with medical staff, Arlene's getting all of our legal I's dotted and T's crossed, but bottom line, hypothermia, exhaustion, confusion. He washed up in a local flood apparently."

_Unfortunate turn of phrase_, the writer half of David Rossi thought. _Makes him sound like a dead fish or a bit of flotsam._

"I'll be there," Rossi said. He glanced at the picture Morgan had sent him, but not for long; Aaron looked too damned much like a corpse in it.

_Central Pennsylvania,_ he thought after he hung up. _Home to Joseph McAfee, usual vacation grounds for Arnold Rubey. Too bad both of them have been eliminated so conclusively._

There was no way he was going back to sleep, even though at long last he could close his eyes without wondering what Aaron was thinking, feeling, enduring. He pulled his pants on and went downstairs to the kitchen, still clinging to his phone like a lifeline.

_Three hours,_ he thought as he cranked up the coffeemaker. _Three hours and we're on our way. We're coming, Aaron._

**~ o ~**

**2:56 AM**

Spencer Reid was already awake when his phone rang, because his upstairs neighbors were fighting the flu and they kept marching back and forth between the bedroom and bathroom. When he saw Morgan's ID on his faceplate, his first thought was that something terrible had happened. Terrible things often seemed to happen when he hadn't had enough sleep.

"We have him," Morgan said, without prologue. "He's in a hospital in Central Pennsylvania, alive and free."

_Well, "terrible" also means awesomely wonderful, after all._ He hadn't felt this fully awake in days. "Who got him out?"

"We don't know. He came in along with other victims of a local flood."

"Where was he found?"

"Middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, some place called Blue Bauman Mountain."

"Shield of Yahweh," Reid blurted, recalling his researches in Georgia and upon his return. "Or Eagle Brigade Eighty-Eight. Both of them active in that area, although not recently. Not the current Shield of Yahweh—an earlier group with the same name. Eagle Brigade bought a lot of that Brunner's soap, and one arm of Shield of Yahweh was located just below Blue Bauman Mountain."

"I love you," Morgan said with a chuckle. "I love how I can wake you up out of a sound sleep and get exactly the information I need. Wheels up at six, OK?"

"I'll be there. Is anyone calling Sean?"

"He's on my list. You want to do it?"

"Yeah, I'd like to do that. What's his condition?"

"Critical, but they'll probably adjust that when they have more information."

After he hung up, Reid gazed at the picture on his cell phone for a few seconds. He sighed with satisfaction and punched in Sean's number. "Hey," he said when the younger Hotchner brother answered. He didn't apologize for waking him, because at this hour of the night, the catering service he managed was just shutting down. "I don't have a whole lot of information yet," he said, "but Aaron's been found. He's alive, hospitalized. I'll get back to you as soon as I have more details. I just wanted to take that weight off your shoulders."

"Oh, my God," the young man all but sobbed. "You've made my day. My week. My month. Hell," he added, "you've made my life."

**~ o ~**

**3:01 AM**

Jennifer Jareau climbed out of the bed she and Will shared two nights a week. She kissed him on the cheek, blew a kiss at their sleeping son in his porta-crib in the corner, and slipped into her bathrobe. She tiptoed down the hall and tapped on the slightly ajar door of Jess Brooks's room.

"What?" Haley's sister mumbled. "What's wrong?"

"Can I come in?"

"Course. What's up?"

The light flickered on as JJ entered the bedroom.

"He's free," she said simply. "He's in a hospital in Pennsylvania, and he's free."

Jessica was fully awake now, her eyes wide. She patted the bed. "Sit, sit! Talk to me! Where did they find him? How did they get him? Did they get the bastards who did this?"

"No information on that yet," JJ said. "Apparently they just let him go. There was a local flood and they just—let him loose."

"Oh, God," Jess blurted. She lunged forward and hugged JJ fiercely. "That's amazing. I was starting to think that maybe—you know—"

"We all wondered sometimes," JJ agreed. "And this is far from over, I'm sure, but—it's a start."

"Do you think it would be terrible if I let Jack sleep a little longer?"

"No, he needs his rest. You can tell him when you wake him up in the morning. We may know more by then."

"When can we see—"

"The Team's heading up there in three hours," JJ said, "and we'll know more about how he's doing not long after we get there, I'm sure. We'll keep in constant touch, I promise. Will and Henry are staying here for the moment. They'll give you any support you need. I'm gonna get dressed and head in to Q now," she confessed. "I can't sit still."

**~ o ~**

**3:10 AM**

"Are you sure?" Penelope Garcia gasped, literally clutching at the bosom of her nightshirt.

"Dead sure, Baby Girl," Morgan assured her. "There's no way we're gonna leave you sitting back home for something like this. Six o'clock, and we want your cute little butt on the plane with us. You still have your go-bag ready, right?"

"I sure do!" She actually pinched herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming—_does that work, really?_—and it stung. _OK, maybe it does._ "He doesn't look good in that picture, you know," she added.

"I know, sweetness," Morgan said with a gentle laugh. "But he wasn't awake enough to go all Hotchy on us."

"You're missing the point, Derek. He practically looks _dead_, and he still looks better than he did in the videos! Is that scary, or what?"

"Baby Girl, you have the sweetest, kindest heart in the world. You're right, of course. I don't think it's possible that he could ever look any worse than he did in the videos. So—six, right?"

"I'll be there!"

Actually, she decided as soon as she'd rung off, she'd be there within an hour. There was no way she could hang around her apartment. In fact—and it kind of freaked her out to realize it—she wanted to touch the doorknob of Hotch's office; to run her fingers along the outside of his coffee mug, which the Team had insisted on maintaining in its place on the shelf, sending the 24/7 message: _You will return. You will come back and we'll welcome you and life will go on._

**~ o ~**

**3:17 AM**

Emily Prentiss pulled over to the curb, all but hyperventilating. With trembling fingers, she made herself look once again at the text message from Ambassador Prentiss.

_saw newsfeed, so glad ur boss found alive, pity he'll be too damagd to function, you'll get promotn soon maybe?_

All she could think of was her mother's dismissive summary of Aaron Hotchner's sort of non-consensual night with her:_ "So I got a night of joy with your—hot, but oh, so very nervous and self-conscious friend, not that it interfered overmuch with his performance…."_

_He survived you, Mother,_ Emily thought, her face grim. _He survived you and created a life and a marriage and a beautiful baby boy and he created the Team as it is today. He survived you, you soul-sucking bitch. Whatever Warden did to him has to be a piece of cake next to that._

She pulled her car away from the curb and floored it, tearing through the pre-dawn streets and almost praying that some poor fool cop would try to stop her. She needed to scream at someone.

**~ o ~**

The trip from the airport to the little satellite hospital actually took longer than the flight from there to here had taken, when you factored in the confusion with the SUVs delivered from the Pittsburgh field office and all the rescue support activities going on in the flooded area.

By the time they made it to the fourth floor of the hospital to meet with the attending doctor, a young internist named Marx, it was a little after eleven, and David Rossi was pretty much beside himself. Age was supposed to confer patience, but his own psychological makeup had yet to get that memo.

Dr. Marx ushered everyone into a small conference room, introduced himself, and asked for their names and credentials.

"When can we see him?" Spencer Reid said, saving Rossi the embarrassment of being the one to say it.

Marx sighed. "In just a few minutes, Agent—er, Doctor," he replied. "I just wanted to be sure we're all on the same page with this." He glanced at some papers on his clipboard. "Making sure all the HIPAA issues are addressed."

"We're covered by both the business associate and the law enforcement sections of HIPAA," Penelope Garcia snapped. "Paragraphs—"

"Thank you," Dr. Marx said, shutting her down smoothly but kindly, "I'm gathering that from the communications we've already had from the DoJ. All right, here's what you need to know.

"The patient in question was admitted at 2:36 this morning, unresponsive, and with a core body temperature on the low end of moderate hypothermia. He has briefly regained consciousness three times so far, each time demonstrating confusion and combativeness. Once when asked his name he answered that his name was 'Prisoner.' His exact words were, 'Prisoner, sir.' The second and third times he wasn't conscious enough to respond to speech. He has repeatedly tried to remove his IV lines.

"He's currently receiving active external warming therapy. He's in light restraints to minimize his movements and is catheterized. He's receiving fluids and broad-spectrum antibiotics—"

"Antibiotics?" It was Reid again.

"Yes, bacterial infections are common in a flooding situation, Dr. Reid."

"Thank you. Please go on."

"For the most part, I believe we've differentiated between injuries sustained during his, ah, confinement from May to September, and the injuries sustained during the attack that occurred last November." Marx glanced up with an awkward smile. "I had no idea that the FBI was so—physically challenging."

"Hotch attracted the attention of the Boston Reaper," Emily Prentiss said. "He was obsessed with him."

Marx's eyes narrowed. "Boston Reaper, Boston Reaper," he muttered half to himself. "I think I read about that online, right? Eventually he tackled the wrong victim, right? Someone killed him?"

"That was Hotch—ah, Agent Hotchner," Morgan confirmed.

"Oh. I thought that he'd been a _victim_ of the Reaper—"

Rossi saw the problem. "He was," he said. "Foyet came back for him again, and the second time, Aaron killed him."

"Ah. All right. Well, anyway, other than some superficial scrapes and bruises consistent with battling a fast-moving current, and the healing scars around his wrists, the patient seems to be in fairly good condition other than hypothermia and exhaustion.

"I want to warn you, however," the doctor concluded, "that confusion and memory loss come with the territory here. It's usually temporary, and the less you push him, the more quickly it'll return, but when he wakes up, don't be surprised if he's disoriented, perhaps dramatically so. Within the next hour or so Dr. Wu will want to meet with you to talk about disorientation and how best to deal with it." He sighed. "So, are there any questions I haven't addressed?"

They all exchanged looks. Personally, Rossi wanted to ask a couple questions, but he was damned if he'd ask them in front of everyone else, so he tagged along down the hall after the doctor with the rest of the crowd.

They entered the room almost on tiptoe, silent, solemn.

A small part of Rossi's spirit hoped that a miracle would have occurred over the past ten minutes or so—that they would find the unit chief, well, the former unit chief—sitting up, weary, perhaps a little disoriented, but conscious, alert.

Instead they entered a room silent but for the beeping of telemetry and the hum of a motor in a small white box. A bruised and battered Aaron Hotchner lay perfectly flat and still on a bed of inflated plastic, with wires everywhere and tubes running into both his arms. Soft cuffs encircled his wrists, and his arms were restrained by a padded strap across his upper body. Another strap held his legs immobile. A thermal blanket lined with reflective material covered his body. An incongruous gray knit cap was pulled over his head.

Rossi had known Aaron for fourteen years and couldn't recall ever having seen him in a hat before. That alone ratcheted up the _weird_.

Derek Morgan approached the bed with a facial expression that seemed almost agonized. He gripped the side rail hard with both hands and gazed down on his colleague. "So thin," he whispered aloud, and Rossi wasn't sure whether Morgan was talking to them or to him or to Hotch or even just to himself. "Too goddamn thin."

_Thin_ barely described him; beneath the bruises and the swelling, he looked fragile, almost emaciated. His cheekbones protruded and his eyes were dark hollows.

"Aaron?" Rossi said, then repeated it, nudging Hotchner's shoulder. "Aaron? You there?" When there was no response, he looked down at the floor, too depressed to make eye contact with anyone.

"You're absolutely sure," JJ asked Dr. Marx, "that the injuries we're seeing are the result of environmental damage, and not a physical attack?"

The internist's lips tightened. "There's no way to be absolutely sure," he replied, "but it's all completely consistent with environmental encounters."

"But it also looks consistent with a physical attack," JJ persisted.

Marx folded. "It's possible."

There was a moment or so of silence, then Morgan said to the group, "How about Dave and I go downstairs and talk to the people who found him, and the rest of you can work out a system so Hotch doesn't ever wake up and find himself alone." He glanced at Rossi. "I'll take the husband, you take the wife. You ready, man?"

Part of him was relieved to leave that sad, sad room. The rest of him wanted to stay, to hang on for just a few more minutes, because surely Aaron would wake up, and Dave wanted to be there.

"Fine," he said at last, and followed Morgan to the elevator.

**~ o ~**

The woman who had allegedly discovered Aaron Hotchner was tall, rawboned, with the kind of skin that indicates hours spent in the sun and the wind. She wore jeans and a flannel shirt, and she sat still and erect in a quiet corner of the hospital lobby, drinking something from a Starbucks cup.

"Hello, Mrs. Hawthorne," Rossi said. "My name is David Rossi." He presented his credentials to her. "I'm a supervisory special agent with the FBI. We're very grateful to you for bringing Agent Hotchner to town so he could get some help."

"You're welcome," she said. She turned his creds so she could read them better, then reached into her purse and produced her own driver's license. "I suppose you'll want this." The license identified her as Brenda B. Hawthorne, age sixty-eight. In one of those pointless coincidences that life scatters like rosebuds everywhere it goes, she shared a birthday with Hotch, having been born on November 2, 1941.

"Your profession?"

"I'm a retired professor of history at Penn State University. My husband is also retired Penn State faculty."

"And how long have you been retired?"

She smiled thinly. "We cashed in early, Agent Rossi. We left when I was sixty and my husband was sixty-one."

"And this address—this is on Blue Bauman Mountain?"

"It is, Agent. Our house is just a few feet short of the summit."

"I'm going to ask you to tell me everything you can about—about finding Agent Hotchner last night."

"This morning," she corrected. "Around one this morning. And I didn't recognize him as the missing FBI agent at the time." She paused and thought about that. "Actually, I don't think I ever saw a picture of Agent Hotchner, but I can't be positive about that."

"But you saw coverage of his disappearance."

"Oh, certainly. But—I'm a text-oriented person, Agent Rossi. I listen to the news while doing something else, and I generally ignore images as distractions."

That was a downer. It was possible that she had noticed nothing.

"I need for you to tell me a couple things about when you found him, if you don't mind, Ms. Hawthorne."

"I can try," she said. "What do you need to know?"

"I'm all for free-form exploration," he said. "Just—talk to me about finding him. What did you notice?"

She clasped her hands together in her lap. "Visibility was terrible," she began. "Past midnight and the storm was pretty vicious, but—he looked more like a flood victim than someone who was suffering from exposure. And that made no sense, because we are _not_ the lowlands up there. And his trousers were in tatters, I mean I could see his genitals and one of his thighs. They were torn at the seams, not the knees or the seat. The seams of his shirt had torn, too, but—well, shirt seams are generally more heavy-duty than trouser seams. And of course the neckline is the strongest seam, so of course that was what he was hung up on."

"And what did this suggest to you?"

She shrugged. "Well, I'm sure I don't know. I'm not an analyst. But it was all consistent with wading through flood waters, and—I confess that before I realized how well groomed he was I suspected that he might be, excuse me for saying this, a whack-job. One of those crazy militia guys who're still hiding in caves for fear the black helicopters'll get them."

Rossi's pulses began to race. "Are there—cave dwellers in the area?"

"Oh, good Lord, yes," Mrs. Hawthorne said with a sigh. "They show up from time to time, usually when the ground shifts or they get flooded out in the spring or the fall."

He was a seasoned interrogator, and his face showed absolutely nothing, but he felt a great surge of hope. Militants. Separatists. Caves. It all fit together with what they'd inferred from the video. With the groups that used Brunner's Ideal Cold and Hard Water Soap.

"Can you name any of them?" he said, casually, negligently.

She waved a hand dismissively. "Oh, not recently. The, ah, the Eagle Brigade Eighty-Eight, they were a ridge or so to the south of us. Shield of Yahweh—not the one you read about now, but the one that lost everything to, uh, I think it was that outfit in Alabama—they owned the property that butted up against ours back in the 1980s. They don't exist any more; I don't know whether they consider themselves the spiritual descendants of Jerry Heisenthal's bunch or not."

_Eagle Brigade. Shield of Yahweh. Exactly the organizations that Reid had identified as active in the area._

"And they own the property behind yours?"

"No, they lost it in the—they were sued. Southern Poverty Law Center sues hate groups in the name of victims of their hate crimes. They sued, they won, and the property was ceded to the mother of two men they killed. She lived in Maryland, as I recall. She sold it to Gabe Wendelin, he's a local. Ted and I bought the chunk of it that bordered our property because there was a stable on it that was three times the size of our own."

She considered what she had just said. Rossi had questions on the tip of his tongue, but the intensity of the elderly woman's expression prompted him to keep silent.

"We lost that part of our property late Monday night," she said at last. "On the thirteenth. We lost the stable and the land around it to what the news is calling the Yarberry Road Slide. The whole back quarter of Blue Bauman dropped almost fifty feet. And that may or may not relate to your missing agent."

**~ o ~**

Aaron Hotchner was in a semiprivate room, in the bed further from the door, but he had no roommate—and he wouldn't be getting one.

Garcia was manning her computer from a dedicated hub in the waiting room at the end of the corridor. Morgan and Rossi were interviewing everyone who had seen Hotch, trying to figure out how and why he had been freed. Had he been released? Had he escaped? Had someone broken in to save another prisoner and rescued him almost inadvertently? Spencer Reid hung over Garcia's shoulder and did his map thing on a sketch pad—he would have a regular white board once they got the the sheriff's offices, but so far, nobody wanted to leave the place the locals called St. Vee Central.

Currently, Emily Prentiss was Hotchner's appointed guardian, so she sat curled sideways in the largest of the chairs in his room. She was trying to read an espionage thriller penned by someone whose research into the world of spycraft seemed to come from the cinema, whose knowledge of Arabic probably came from online phrase books, and whose grasp of geography was—creative. _Cruise liners on the Jordan River? Hello? _

From time to time, Hotch's breathing pattern would change subtly. He would stir and sigh and his pulse and respiration would rise a few points—never enough to trigger any alarms at the nurses' station—but even when Emily spoke to him, even the time she raced to the bed and touched his arm, reassuring him, "I'm here, you're safe, it's Emily," he made no response. After a minute or so, his numbers would sink back to those of someone in a deep sleep.

Perhaps because she'd had little sleep, she began to think of the display of Hotch's telemetry as a scoreboard, sort of like the one at the ballpark. The next time a nurse came in to check his IV lines, she asked him which number was most important on his scoreboard.

The nurse tapped a figure in the corner. "That one," he said. "His core body temperature."

She stared at it. "That can't be right," she said. It said 85.8. She'd viewed _corpses_ with body temperatures higher than that.

"Yes," the young man said sympathetically, "he's coming up quite nicely, isn't he? He's some fighter."

_Good God, eighty-five? What was it when he got here?_


	43. Awakening

A/N: Here we are, in the home stretch, the last few chapters! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor! We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world. We continue battling health issues, both our own and those of our loved ones, but we're really pumped about seeing this through to its conclusion.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much! We cannot express adequately how tickled we are when people have read our story carefully enough that they've picked up the clues about what would happen next. We're delighted and honored and thrilled by your kindness and enthusiasm!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-Three**

**Awakening**

_Shadows and deep water and an unpainted wooden rowboat. Jack embracing Sean's cocker spaniel, asking for a dog of his own. Walking rapidly through an airport, unable to find where the BAU jet was parked, knowing that everyone was looking at him, judging him—what kind of Unit Chief misplaces his plane? He didn't dare turn around; the man walking behind him, the hugely fat man in the black trench coat, would laugh in his face. He bought chocolate covered cherries for Haley but when he got home, they were chocolate covered almonds. The water was closing over his head and he struggled and choked and knew he was drowning._

**~ o ~**

It was all about deploying resources.

Derek Morgan was starting to feel like a traffic cop again. It came with unit chief territory; he'd discussed it on several occasions with Hotch back in the days when Aaron had stepped down to focus on nailing the Reaper. Making sure that every team member was being used to his or her maximum capacity, that as nearly as possible, tasks aligned with the individual's strengths—always allowing opportunities for cross-training—soaked up a lot of a unit chief's time and mental energy.

At the moment, Morgan sat on a bench outside St. Vee Central next to a tall, gaunt, retired college professor, Dr. Theodore K. Hawthorne, and watched with wonder as the man drew in Derek's notebook a precise crime scene sketch of his property, the house, the driveway, the car, and the exact location at which he had first seen Hotchner. Reid might be impressed with this guy, Derek found himself thinking. The two men shared a deep need to _get it right_.

In a few minutes, he'd be heading back upstairs so the Team could meet with Dr. Wu, the neurologist who'd be discussing confusion strategies with them. At some point in the next hour or so, Philly field office would bring in Dr. Carney, a retired forensic pathologist, who would—with Reid and JJ— examine Hotch's body for evidence of what had happened to him over the last two days.

Jess Brooks and Jack Hotchner would arrive tomorrow morning. God, Morgan hoped Hotch was awake and coherent by then; an unconscious or irrational father might traumatize Jack more than not seeing his dad at all. Sean Hotchner was trying to rearrange his schedule so he could come out to Pennsylvania, too.

"I removed his socks in the car," Dr. Hawthorne was saying.

"Sorry?" He needed to pay more attention to what he was doing.

"Bren drove, and I sat in the back seat with—with Agent Hotchner," Hawthorne explained. "His feet were very, very muddy; he'd been slipping and sliding around for a while. That was obvious. He was wearing no shoes, but he did have three pairs of sweat socks on his feet."

"Sweat socks?"

Hawthorne nodded. "Plain white tube socks, like you can pick up for a song at Family Dollar. I took all three pairs off so he wouldn't get mud all over the place, then I chafed his feet with the edge of the blanket. It seemed to—to rouse him somewhat. That was the point at which he started mumbling the numbers at me."

_Mud. Soil samples._

"Do you still have the socks?" Morgan asked, all but crossing his fingers.

"Sure. They're still on the floor of the back seat." Hawthorne reached into his pocket and produced his keyring. Handing it to Morgan, he nodded toward the front visitors' parking area. "The white Ford Fusion, over there at the end of the second row."

**~ o ~**

_He was in a hospital. He struggled against his bonds. He craned his neck and looked around for Warden and his box cutter, but he was nowhere in sight. He bought a box of Christmas cards, oversized, oddly shaped cards with a cartoon cat in a Santa Claus outfit. There were only sixteen cards, but that would be enough. He didn't have many friends anymore. He needed to buy snacks for the Christmas party. He could only find three boxes of chocolate covered cherries, so he added some chocolate covered almonds. The enormously fat man in the black trench coat who followed him everywhere lent him $11 at the register because he hadn't brought enough money. He watched a light spinning away in the distance, leaving him in complete darkness. He was gagging, choking, and the fat man in the trench coat picked him up by the lapels of his suit coat, shook him viciously, and screamed "Breathe!" in his face._

**~ o ~**

The little old man—there was no other way to describe him; he looked like one of those wrinkly antique apple dolls or a Shar-Pei puppy in a blue pinstripe suit—turned on the high-intensity examination lights above the bed and slipped on a pair of flesh-tone latex gloves. "Would you like to join me and watch?" he asked Jen and Spencer Reid. "Feel free to ask questions. Just be aware that it's possible that the patient will hear what you're saying."

JJ looked down at the man who had been their unit chief—and would be again, she hoped. In a way, it was a good thing that Dr. Carney, a man who dealt in death, was aware that the man he was about to examine was alive. "Thank you," she said. She shoved her fingers into blue latex evidence gloves. Reid's were lavender, both a different size and a different brand.

Carney bent over and studied Aaron's face, then lifted the edge of the knit cap and finally removed it all the way, running his fingers slowly and carefully through the dark hair. He turned the head this way and that, frowned, and shone his own very bright light source at an angle across Hotch's scalp. Then he straightened slightly.

"From the angles, it seems that most of the injuries to his scalp were a result of something coming directly down on the head—not blows, but falling objects. It's possible that some of them are from being struck by a person on the same level he was on. Many, however, seem to have come straight down without hesitation or slant. I'm not saying that they're necessarily environmental," he added, "but it's an unusual angle for an attack."

He replaced the knit cap on Hotch's head, pulling it down snugly over his ears, and peered into the neck of his hospital gown. "Same phenomenon on at least some of the bruises on his shoulders," he said. He adjusted the thermal blanket and exposed one of Hotchner's hands, still restrained against the bed rail.

"See the damage to the knuckles?" JJ said. "Doesn't that look defensive?" She wasn't sure why it was so important for her to believe that Hotch had battled his way to freedom with his fists, beating crap out of the people who'd beaten the crap out of him. Maybe it was because the image of Warden—whoever he (or they) might be—walking around Huntingdon County with a pair of black eyes and a broken nose, easy to identify, satisfied her on a professional level.

Carney examined the fingers, then turned them upward and frowned at the exposed palms. "This is the interesting bit, here," he said, turning Aaron's palm so it was visible to JJ on her side of the bed. "See that raw area there? That, and this—" he slowly rotated the hand to demonstrate that the raw area tracked all the way around the hand. "—this is a rope burn," he said. "On that hand, too, correct?"

She reached under the blanket and studied Hotchner's left hand. Now that she looked at it, what she'd interpreted as a massive welt could potentially be a friction burn. "But how would that be inflicted?"

"Good question," the elderly doctor murmured. "In the absence of—let me check something here—" He unclipped the strap across Hotch's upper body. He lowered the blanket down to Hotch's abdomen and lifted his gown. "There, see," he said, indicating broad, vivid friction burns all up and down the exposed chest and sides. "We see faint versions of that on cavers and mountaineers sometimes."

"See what?"

"The friction burns are from climbing, either up or down. He had a rope around his waist, too, see, you can even make out where the knot was and how it lay against him. This probably happened when he was climbing to safety, and this—" He turned Hotch slightly and indicated other friction lines. "This indicates that he was on a line with another person. That they were engaged in caving or mountaineering activities without proper gear or protection."

"You mean," Reid said, "that someone pulled him up?"

"I mean that he was engaged in a cooperative effort with another person to climb to safety. Possibly to rappel down to safety, but more likely climbing. And given the state of his nails, my guess is that the other individual was directing the activity." Dr. Carney gave a quick, nervous little smile. "So while I can't rule out someone inflicting violence on him in the last forty-eight hours or so, there was surely someone helping him to climb somewhere."

**~ o ~**

_Someone's hands, surely Haley's, traced along his ribs and up his chest. He was grateful that she was still alive. Her hands were magical. He wanted to sigh, to moan, but then he heard Spencer Reid's voice. Was Haley caressing Reid? Small, precise hands against a dark black background, fingers drilling into something the color and consistency of pitch, then sliding away, sliding down, down, and he lunged, trying to grab the hands, to save them, but they were gone as surely as the light that vanished down the hole. He came around a corner and he knew that there was a clue there, in that empty room. No furniture, no people, not even a window. He turned around and there was no door. Well, that was embarrassing. How was he going to get out of there? The fat man in the corner, the man in the trench coat, grinned broadly. He tried to blame his knee for losing the door. He was distracted by his knee; it was throbbing, and he lost the door._

**~ o ~**

It was shortly before 8:00 in the evening when Hotch had his first significant moments of consciousness, on what otherwise would have been his 124th day of confinement. It was Spencer Reid's turn on duty, not that he considered it a chore.

Reid sat in the chair beside the window, just inches from the rail on the right side of the bed, with his left ankle cocked up on his right knee and a yellow legal pad and a freshly printed-out document balanced on his leg. Now that they knew precisely where Aaron Hotchner had been held, Reid was working out a matrix of possibilities to address the question of how he'd moved from the Shield of Yahweh's intended prison complex to the summit of Blue Bauman Mountain.

He was reviewing a transcript of an interview emailed to them from—life's full of these little coincidences: Laurel Fike, the Denver field agent who'd been part of the Claymore Guffey take-down—speaking to a man named Harshaw, formerly an officer in Shield of Yahweh. They'd built a prison in the caverns and mines beneath Blue Bauman, including a massive cage intended to hold three hundred, and two steel eight-by-eight boxes for isolating and interrogating Federal officials. Harshaw was pretty sure they'd never finished either project; money had been an issue, then they'd been fatally distracted by the civil suit. _It was a long time ago, lady._

No, he had no idea who else still knew about the underground complex. He didn't even know who the hell were calling themselves Shield of Yahweh these days. Certainly nobody he knew. Sure, he'd swear to it. No problem.

Reid looked up and realized he was looking directly into the open eyes of Aaron Hotchner.

He'd turned his head slightly. His eyelids fluttered and his gaze wandered from Reid, to the window, up his right-hand IV line, to the ceiling, to the window—to Spencer Reid. His eyes didn't seem fully focused, but there was recognition there.

Reid reviewed both his own fund of knowledge about confusion and the information that Dr. Wu had given them earlier in the day.

_Don't use his name. Ground him but allow him to piece reality together on his own schedule. In doing so, you may pick up information that you might miss otherwise. Don't try to correct him, and answer his questions in short, concrete sentences._

Those dark, lost eyes in that drawn face, in that stupid gray knit cap, studied him for a long moment.

"Hi," Spencer Reid said. All the million things he'd dreamed of saying, all the thousands of things he was thinking, feeling, and _that_ was the best he could do?

Hotchner's brow seemed to furrow, or maybe it was just the angle. His lips moved. He made a couple vague sounds, almost faint groans, then he managed to say, "Hurt you?"

_Don't act surprised. Don't disagree with him, but don't mislead him._

"Nobody hurt me," Reid said.

He could almost see the wheels turning behind Hotch's eyes as he took in his surroundings, as he struggled to make sense of them. "Where are we?"

_He's teamed us up. Does he think I've been abducted, too?_

"This is the Huntingdon campus of Altoona St. Vincent's Hospital. You're a patient here," he added, hoping he wasn't giving too much information, but wanting to make it clear that they had different roles there.

Hotchner mumbled something that might have been _OK_ and his eyes closed again. Within a few breaths, he was back in a deep sleep. As Reid watched, the numbers for his pulse and respiration returned to the same ranges they'd been in earlier.

Core temperature was better, though. The number in the corner read 92.1. When it reached 94, he would be removed from the cradle of plastic tubing that pumped warm air constantly against his body.

Reid set down his papers and all but sprinted down the hall. "He was awake," he told David Rossi and Penelope Garcia, not even trying to mask his excitement. "He spoke; he knew who I was."

He repeated their brief conversation as completely as he could, including all the nonverbal information he'd picked up. He didn't share with them the fact that he'd started wondering what would happen if Hotch had sustained brain damage, if he'd forgotten what he was or who they were, maybe lost his cognitive abilities, maybe even the ability to connect with another human being. They knew it anyway; his reputation as a world-class catastrophizer was pretty well known around the BAU.

"Thank God," Rossi blurted. "The lights are on and he's home. That's one worry out of the way."

That was another cool thing about the BAU. He wasn't the only catastrophizer.

**~ o ~**

_Unpainted wooden rowboat. _

_Ultima VI._

Summer of 1990.

It was his first real computer game on his first real computer, i.e., one with a hard drive. He would come home to their apartment at night and _kill stuff._ He came home from work one night and his avatar, Pringles (named after Haley's parents' cat), couldn't pick anything up. When he looked at his inventory he discovered that he'd been carrying around that stupid little brown wooden rowboat they'd had to use to get to that town up to the north, whatever it had been. _Yew? Whatever._ Anyhow, it had taken up something like 20 stone of his 26-stone inventory capacity.

_Did I really see Spencer Reid in my dreams? _

It figured it was a hospital dream; he seemed to have them when he was on his back. Funny, he'd never seen a hospital room with a window in his dreams before. The window was new.

He sighed and tried to roll over, but he was unable to budge. He tried to raise his arms, to shift his legs.

_Restrained. Yeah, it's really a dream. I'm fucking dreaming that I woke up. That's just—cruel._

_He was climbing a ladder and huge chunks of something hard, unyielding, rained down on his head, literally rained down with gallons and gallons of filthy, freezing water and something bounced off his head and he fell and some monstrous bitch was squeezing him to death and the fat dude in the trench coat was shouting at him again, not letting him rest, not letting him give up. He stopped at a convenience store for a six-pack and pork rinds and he saw a box of chocolate-covered cherries, Haley's favorite, and he patted his pockets to see whether he had enough money…. _

**~ o ~**

Rossi, Reid, and Penelope Garcia trailed down the hallway after Dr. Wu—a tall and slender bespectacled man who looked more like Harry Potter than an Oriental of any kind—back to Hotch's room. Hotch was again asleep, his pulse and respiration slow and steady.

Dr. Wu nudged gently at the unit chief's shoulder and said, "I need to talk to you. Can you talk to me?"

The man on the inflated plastic heating bed blinked and sighed and turned confused eyes to the doctor.

"My name is Gilbert Wu," the doctor said. "I'm one of your physicians. Can you tell me your name?"

Aaron's gaze flickered slowly from Wu to Rossi to Reid to Garcia and back to Wu. His brows knit briefly, and finally he croaked, "Hotchner?" His voice was both vague and feeble, barely a whisper.

"Do you feel confident that that's your name?"

Again Hotch looked carefully around him, this time clockwise, from Garcia to Wu to Rossi to Reid, and then past Reid to the window. He licked his lips and stammered, "H-H-Hotchner. A-Aaron Hotchner."

"What's your birth date?"

With a little more confidence, Hotch said, "Eleven-oh-two-sixty-five."

"Can you tell me where you are?"

Hotch took a couple deep breaths, looked at the ceiling, looked at the window, looked back at Reid, then Dr. Wu. "Hospital."

Again, Wu neither confirmed nor denied Hotch's answers. "And can you tell me what the date is?"

Hotchner's facial expression became troubled. He stared helplessly at the ceiling for a long minute, then he licked his lips and hazarded, "Twenty-ten?"

"Can you be more precise?"

Hotchner's eyes rolled desperately like those of a trapped interrogation subject. "Ah, middle of the year?"

"Who's the President of the United States?"

Hotchner sighed, obviously relieved to get back to easy stuff. "Barack Obama." His voice was still weak, but he sounded a little more confident.

"What's six times eight?"

"Fift—no, forty-eight." He closed his eyes and sighed deeply. "Forty-eight."

"Can you tell me where you were imprisoned?"

The numbers on his telemetry readout shot upward and his jaw tightened. "Cell," he replied, very quietly. Almost fearfully.

Dr. Wu took an ophthalmoscope out of his pocket and said, "I need to look in your eyes." He lifted first the left eyelid, then the right, looking deep into Hotchner's eyes. "Look over there behind me," he directed. "Look at the TV screen." When he was done, he started all over again. This time, as he looked into the left eye, he said, "What's your birth date again?"

"November second, 'sixty-five." He sounded drowsy.

Raising the right eyelid, Dr. Wu said, "And today's date?"

"Twenty-ten, sir," Hotch answered.

"Where are you?"

"Hospital, sir," Hotch replied.

Wu started checking Aaron's eyes a third time. "What's five times eleven?"

"Fifty-five."

Wu nodded. "What was that?"

"Fifty-five, sir."

Reid looked up at Rossi and Garcia and they exchanged startled glances.

Wu seemed not to notice it. "What's your name?"

"Prisoner, sir."

Wu raised the right eyelid again. "Your name?"

"Ah, Hotchner. My name is, ah, Aaron Hotchner."

"And what's my name?"

"Warden—no, Doctor. Doctor Someone."

Wu tucked his ophthalmoscope back in his pocket. He unclipped the strap and turned back the thermal blanket over Hotchner's torso. "Where are you?"

"Hospital."

Wu slid his hands under Aaron's. "Squeeze my hands," he directed. "Again, harder. Now your left hand." He paused. "Your _left_ hand. Now your right."

He replaced the thermal blanket, pulling it clear up under Hotchner's chin. "Follow my finger, please," he commanded. Hotchner seemed to have difficulty there, always a second or two behind the doctor. "And where were you staying before you got to the hospital?"

"Cell," Aaron answered. "Underground cell."

"And how did you get to the hospital?"

Hotch's eyes opened wide and he stared miserably at the ceiling. "I don't know."

Wu patted Aaron's cheek and his shoulder. "You did well," he said. "Do you want to eat something?"

"No." His voice was barely a whisper.

"What do you want?"

"Sleep."

"Then you sleep," the doctor told him. "Would you like to say hello to your friends before you go to sleep?"

A long hesitation, then, timidly, Hotchner whispered, "Yes, sir." When Wu said nothing else, Hotch looked around at them. "Thank you for being here," he rasped. "Thank you very much." He nodded weakly at each of them and closed his eyes.

**~ o ~**

Jennifer Jareau was the designated Hotch-sitter shortly after midnight, when a nurse and two orderlies entered the room, along with a gurney and some random-looking equipment.

"Would you mind leaving?" the nurse in charge asked.

"I would," JJ replied evenly. She sat motionless in the chair by the window, just daring them to try to move her. "What are you here for?"

"Removing him from the Hugger," the nurse said as one of the orderlies shut off the machine.

JJ nodded understanding. His core body temperature had hit 94 half an hour earlier; this was expected.

The three muttered at each other and she picked up the words_ FBI_, _security_, and _kidnapped_. Finally, as one of the orderlies bent over the bed to unfasten the restraining straps, the nurse drew the privacy drape all the way around the bed. There was movement, quiet conversation, something that might have been a low groan from Hotch, and then a low count, _two, three, lift_.

_Bizarre,_ JJ thought. _Why start at two?_

She set down the reports she'd been reviewing and stood up. Someone yanked the privacy drape open at that point. The orderlies were packing up the body-warming device as the nurse rolled up the straps, the wrist restraints, and one of the IV setups.

Hotch lay on the gurney covered by only a sheet. The security rails were up. The hat was gone and his head was turned to his left. No restraints, no catheter, and just the one IV line running into the back of his right hand.

JJ walked around Aaron's bed and sat down on on the unoccupied bed. "Hey," she said softly.

Hotchner opened his eyes and looked at her. He shifted positions, looked slightly surprised, then raised his left hand and looked at it, at the bruises and rope burns and the still-raw ring that encircled his wrist. He looked at JJ, looked beyond her to the sink, to the open door to the bathroom. To the open doorway into the hall. His eyes widened and his gaze returned to JJ's face. "Really happening?" he whispered.

"You mean, are you in the hospital? Are you free from Warden and the cell?"

He nodded and whispered, "Yeah."

She smiled and extended her hand to squeeze his gently. "Really happening. Welcome back, Hotch."

He lay back, shaking his head slowly. "Jesus. How'd you find me?"

Trying to keep all of Dr. Wu's directions in mind, she said, "What do you remember?"

"We're transferring him back into bed now," the nurse said.

This time they didn't bother to shield him from JJ's view. She wondered what the difference was, how she had somehow gained their trust, then she realized, _Ditz! They were removing the catheter. Jeez, what a dumb blonde!_

"Two, three, lift," the smaller of the two orderlies muttered, and just like that, Aaron Hotchner was tucked into a normal hospital bed with the headboard slightly raised and had reasonable freedom of movement.

"Aaron, I need you to listen to me now. Your water and fruit juice are here," the nurse said, indicating a dusky rose plastic pitcher, a plastic cup, and two waxed one-pint containers. "You need to drink it all, and you need to call us the first time you need to use the bathroom. It's very important that you urinate as soon as you can. Will you do that for me?"

At first Hotch didn't answer.

"Can you do that for me, Aaron?"

Hotch mumbled agreement and the team left.

JJ was hoping to continue her conversation with him, but his gaze was absolutely riveted on the window. The rain had begun again, this time just a light pattering. Beyond the hospital, cars moved up and down the hills. Signs flashed. People strolled along the sidewalks under umbrellas.

"Would you like me to raise the headboard a little more and bring you another pillow?" she asked. "Then I can turn off the lights so you can see better."

His hopeful look spoke louder than any affirmative in the world. She arranged the pillows and helped him situate himself so he got the best visual angle. She opened a container of apple juice, stuck a straw into the slot, and handed it to him. "Drink," she said. As his lips curled around the straw, she turned off the overhead lights.

As silent and intent as a housecat on a windowsill, Aaron Hotchner watched the night world.


	44. Versions of Reality

A/N: Here we are, in the home stretch, the last few chapters! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor! We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world. We continue battling health issues, both our own and those of our loved ones, but we're really pumped about seeing this through to its conclusion.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much! We cannot express adequately how tickled we are when people have read our story carefully enough that they've picked up the clues about what would happen next. We're delighted and honored and thrilled by your kindness and enthusiasm!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-Four**

**Versions of Reality**

JJ sat in the near-darkness in the chair near the foot of the bed and watched Hotch watch the world go by. It was still hard to believe that they had him, that he was safe, that he was still himself—well, sort of. He was demonstrating coherence, but Dr. Wu had warned them to allow him at least forty-eight hours more to get himself oriented. Maybe part of that process was staring moodily out at the midnight streets of a town with a population about the size of a big-city high school.

At least he was working on his fruit juices. He'd already finished the apple juice and started in on the orange juice.

Then it hit her, and she wasn't sure how she'd missed it. There was a whole area of his life that he had yet to mention at all. Rather than phrase it as a question, she made it a short, concrete statement.

"Jess and Jack will arrive tomorrow," she said.

"Don't!" he barked. His body language tightened up and he turned his face as far away from hers as he could and still see the window.

His hostility confused the hell out of her.

_OK, so maybe not so coherent_, she thought.

"Can I help you?" a disembodied voice said over a speaker.

"I'm ready to use the bathroom, if it's convenient," Hotch told it.

"Someone will be right down," the voice assured him. "Do you need anything else?"

"No, thank you very much," he replied. He even seemed himself again. Pleasant, gracious, courteous.

"Would you like for me to step out for a few minutes?" she asked, more to test the waters between them than because she really thought he wanted privacy.

"No, it's fine," he said with a sigh. "Just—too much detail."

She made another mental note, another jangly aspect to Aaron Hotchner's cognition.

He sighed again, then he fumbled for and found the switch for the reading light and turned it on. Then he turned himself, wincing slightly, so his legs hung over the left side of the bed, the side closer to the door and the bathroom. He wore heavy foam slippers. She hadn't realized how battered his shins were before then. His left knee was hugely swollen, too.

The nurse and the two orderlies returned bearing towels and washcloths and extra gowns. "Have you tried to stand up yet?" the nurse asked.

Hotch shook his head and muttered a negative, but she quickly reassured him that he wasn't supposed to be trying to get up alone anyway. The two orderlies helped him to his feet and wrangled his IV and its stand. The nurse threaded the IV bag through a sleeve of a second hospital gown they put on him backwards to use as a robe of sorts.

"You need to lean on Miguel, there," the nurse said. "Keep your weight off that left knee. I can get you a walker, if you—"

"I'm fine," Hotchner protested. "Really." But the first step he took made a liar out of him; he gritted his teeth and choked back a cry and clutched desperately at Miguel's shoulder as his left leg gave out under him.

"You're not here to be a tough guy," the nurse said gently. "You're not here to impress me. You're here to get better. That's better, that's much better," she added as he slowly drew himself back upright. "Slowly, take it slowly. One foot at a time. Adjust to what your body's telling you."

"This is new," he muttered, but he followed her directions. He wrapped his right hand around his IV pole and together the three of them got him to the bathroom door. The nurse and the orderlies waited outside the door for him.

While he was otherwise occupied, JJ took time to make detailed notes of her observations on her iPad. She would chalk it up to Hotch's notorious denial mechanism except for those little odd things, like not wanting to see Jack (or maybe just not wanting her to talk about Jack). Like the thing about _too much detail_.

Almost before she was finished, it seemed, Hotch was opening the door. Grimly hanging onto the door jamb and his IV pole, he limped unassisted out of the bathroom. Then he accepted Miguel's help around the vacant bed, and fell with a grateful groan into his own.

One of the orderlies, the one who wasn't Miguel, stuck around to get his IV straightened out. Hotchner smiled and thanked him and pulled the blankets up around him.

When they were alone, he said, "I'm still getting used to being warm."

"It must've been pretty cold that far underground." He said nothing, just nodded and pulled his arms up tight against his body.

She tried again. "What happened to your knee?" _OK, that's kind of concrete, right?_

He looked at her wearily. "I don't know."

"What _do_ you remember?"

He lay back against the pillows, his eyes shut. "I tried to save him," he whispered. "I can see my hand, reaching for his hand, trying to keep him from falling back down, but the mud kept moving and we were both so wet and slippery and I grabbed his hands and we couldn't—we couldn't hang on to each other." His face twisted with something—grief? Guilt? Maybe just his knee throbbing?—and he drew his arms up, hugging himself. "And he's gone."

Scarcely breathing, not wanting to break his concentration, she said, "Who was it you were trying to save?"

"Him," he replied. "Warden." He fussed with his sheet and blanket and groped for the switch to turn out his reading light. "I don't want to talk any more. I have a lot to think about."

**~ o ~**

In the waiting room of St. Vee Central, Derek Morgan completed some Bureau paperwork and watched the TV bolted to the wall. The man who'd driven his elderly neighbor to St. Vee had collected her (now on crutches) and taken her home. The young couple whose toddler had eaten something they thought might be a pill of some kind had been taken into emergency treatment. Now it was just Derek and the late-night cable news.

The Yarberry Road Slide wasn't the top of the national news, but it definitely got mention every hour. Thousands upon thousands of tons of Blue Bauman Mountain had been displaced downward, burying two country roads, three houses, several vehicles, assorted agricultural outbuildings, and acres of formerly arable land. The county, small and poor as it might be, had succeeded in evacuating most folks, but two were confirmed dead and another five were missing. The Aaron Hotchner angle got a lot of play, mostly of the "unexpected good things coming from bad" variety. The public ate up that kind of contrast.

He'd tapped Rossi to make the official statement. They had to walk a fine line right now, since they still had no idea whether Hotch had fought his way to freedom or had been freed. The third option, that he'd simply walked away from his prison when flooding made it possible, was a non-starter. Eight separate experts in geology and engineering had assured them that the underground complex that Shield of Yahweh had left unfinished in the 1980s was by now thoroughly pancaked. Nobody had just strolled out of there.

"Hey," a familiar voice said.

Morgan glared at the bearded agent sauntering into the waiting room. "You damn well best be coming to the hospital because you broke your ass-bone, Rossi. I told you, I need you well rested in the morning."

"Yeah," Rossi replied, dropping into the chair beside Derek's. "Like I'm gonna get any sleep tonight. I'm better off Hotch-sitting. Besides, him and me go back. You know that, man."

Morgan checked his watch. "I'm relieving JJ in just fifteen minutes. Less than that."

"Then let's head on up there," the senior profiler said, with his warmest, most persuasive grin. "Let's cut Blondie loose so she can get some downtime and call her honey."

"Yeah, downtime _where_?"

Which was, of course, another problem for them. The very few motel rooms available in this very small county had been jammed with news people and representatives from various relief agencies for over a week. So had most of the rooms available in the surrounding counties. Their rooms were an eighty-minute one-way drive from the hospital. They'd even joked a bit about possibly showing up at the refugee center and asking for a cot and three hots from the relief folks.

Morgan stood up. "Maybe one of us can catch a few Z's on the spare bed."

"Nurses hate that," Rossi warned, but he followed Morgan to the elevator.

Four minutes later, they entered Aaron Hotchner's room. The lights were off and the door to the bathroom was closed. JJ, who had evidently been reading on her iPad, popped out of her seat. "Hall," she whispered, pointing in that direction, and continued past the bathroom to accompany Dave and Derek back out into the corridor.

"He's not walking well," she told them in quiet tones, though it was unlikely Hotch could have heard anything they said from inside the bathroom. "He doesn't always make sense. He kind of freaked when I told him Jess and Jack were coming, said for me not to talk about it. He still doesn't know any details of how he got out but he remembers Warden slipping down a mudslide or cliff or something and trying to grab him but they lost their grip on each other."

Morgan all but backed into the wall. "So—Warden was the one who pulled him out, but he fell and died? He's sure about this?"

"Apparently. He's pretty troubled about it. Ever since he managed to remember that, he's just been—distraught. Withdrawn. Guys, there's some Stockholm going on there. He's got a long way to go to recover from this, a _long _way to go. It seems to help him to look out the window—isn't hard to figure out why."

They hugged her and waved good-bye to her as she headed back to the motel, still clearly troubled by what she'd observed about Hotch.

"What do you think?" Morgan asked Rossi.

"We just take it one step at a time. We can't run with Stockholm until we're sure that he's over any confusion." Rossi moved the visitor chair from the vacant bed over close to Hotch's bed. "Think that's why the lights are out? So he can see out the window?"

"Probably."

Morgan sat in the chair JJ had occupied and opened up his own iPad. It was nice to be in a room that didn't have a TV blaring constantly.

After a couple minutes, though, he suddenly looked up, startled. "Way too long," he said.

He leaped from the chair and lunged for the bathroom. "Hotch?" he said, and tapped on the door. "Hotch!" When there was no immediate response, he tried the door. Fortunately, it was unlocked. _(Can you even lock a hospital bathroom? I don't think I've ever noticed.)_ Morgan threw the door open to find Aaron standing bewildered in the center of the room, clinging to his IV pole with both hands. Maybe it was the lights, the mirrors, the walls, the fixtures—maybe it was some buzzing sound only he could hear, God alone knew what it was, but the former unit chief was completely disoriented.

"It's OK," Morgan said, more for his own benefit than for Hotch's. He suspected nothing was going to be OK for Hotch for a long time. "It's OK." He took Aaron's arm, and when he didn't flinch away, decided, _just screw this_, and wrapped his arms around him. Hotchner just stood there, mutely accepting the embrace. _God damn, but he's skin and bones!_ "It's not OK yet," Derek murmured to him, rocking slightly back and forth as though comforting a child. "It's not OK yet, but it will be. It will be, I promise you."

"I got lost," Hotchner whispered.

"I know. I know." Derek nodded at Rossi, who had materialized at the door looking about as devastated as a man who has lost his best friend.

_And maybe he has._

The two of them gently shepherded a heavily limping Hotchner back to his bed. He sat down, compliant and passive, and twisted his hands in his lap. "Where did the bruises come from?" he asked suddenly.

Derek nudged him back into the bed while Rossi managed the bedclothes and the IV. "Which bruises do you mean?" he asked once he had Aaron covered up. "Do you want to sleep now?"

Hotchner shook his head vaguely. "I'm fine," he said—the first typically Hotch thing he had said since they arrived. He leaned back in the pillows and stared up at the ceiling. "But I don't understand the bruises on my face. And on my legs."

"You don't remember them?" 

"No. I haven't—you know—been, been uncooperative since, since—since the paper clip thing."

_Christ, the more I hear the less I understand_, Morgan thought gloomily.

Once again curled into the pillows in the dark, Aaron Hotchner drifted off to sleep.

**~ o ~**

He heard the whine and rattle of the elevator. He heard the squeal of the scissor-gate and the irregular bumping of Warden's hand truck running across the uneven rock floor. Heard that familiar thumping of Nortie's hand against the wall.

"Are you awake?"

_Fuck. Doesn't it just figure that I dreamed I was free?_

He sighed and replied, "Yes, sir. I'm awake, sir."

"Do you need something?"

He blinked and tried to make sense of his surroundings. _Something wrong with my eyes. _"No, sir," he answered finally.

"You need to eat something," Warden said. His voice was prissier than usual. "Can I bring you a sandwich?"

He sagged in despair. He was hungry, but he was so fucking sick of those fucking sandwiches.How had he lost his microwave privileges?

He tried to sit up. His left knee hurt like a sonofabitch. So did everything else, come to think of it.

_I must have tried to escape again._

His right hand itched. He tried to scratch it with his left hand.

"You need to leave that alone," Warden said, but his voice was all wrong—

And suddenly he was looking around a hospital room, the same one he'd been in before, only Morgan sat where JJ had been and Dave Rossi had pulled up another chair close to Morgan's. The overhead light was on and a nurse—_I think I've seen her before, right, she took me to the bathroom_—stood beside his bed.

It hit him full force then: _I'm really free._

He cracked up then, laughed until his whole body ached, until tears streamed down his face and he got a case of the hiccups.

_I'm in a hospital and I had a cell dream. Christ, can it get any crazier?_

"What kind of—_hic_—sandwich is it?" he asked the nurse.

"I'm not sure, but probably turkey club," she told him. "And I can bring you chips or yogurt or a fruit cup or a cup of ice cream."

He stared at her for a long, hiccup-laden moment. "Can I have all of them?"

She had a terrific smile, warm and encouraging. Sympathetic smiles are a dime a dozen, but an encouraging smile is tough to pull off. Her hospital ID said her name was Francie Stark, RN. "You sure can, honey."

**~ o ~**

It was a tough call which was the scariest: hearing Aaron repeatedly call the nurse "sir," hearing his humble, submissive tones when he did so, or his descent into hysterical laughter once his eyes were open. The Aaron Hotchner that David Rossi had known and respected, had loved like a surrogate son, for fourteen years wasn't a laugher; he wasn't even much of a chuckler. He had a glorious smile that lit up the whole freaking room, but he didn't laugh often. He certainly didn't laugh in a hospital bed at almost three in the morning.

Now—with both his laughter and its resultant fit of hiccups past—Aaron sat more upright than Dave had yet seen since his return. He had combined his last two snacks, pouring the sliced peaches and nectarines over his cup of vanilla ice cream.

Rossi had never paid much attention to Aaron's eating habits; they were invariably talking when they shared meals, and Dave's focus had always been on what everyone was saying.

Did he always eat that slowly, that deliberately?

Choosing his words carefully, he said, "What did you eat in the cell?"

Aaron made a face of distaste. "Sandwiches, mostly. Peanut butter and honey sandwiches on whole wheat bread."

That surprised Rossi, but he kept his features bland. _Like that's gonna fool Aaron._ "I've never heard of that combination. Did they come prepackaged, or did you make them yourself?"

Hotch shook his head. "Neither. He did. Warden did. He said they were the optimum blend of protein, fiber, and sugars, and they helped prevent infections." When he was done speaking he suddenly looked off to the side, distracted. Saddened.

Rossi fell silent, letting his old friend work through his tangled feelings in privacy. When Hotch was done with his snack, when he'd been to the bathroom again and was settled in among the pillows, Dave spoke again. "Can I read you a list of names?" he asked.

Hotchner gave him a long, shrewd glance, then sighed. "Sure."

"OK, great. Just eleven names here. Tell me if they ring any kind of bell at all, even a crazy one, OK? You know the drill on this."

"Sure." Aaron was getting sleepy again, and that suited Rossi's purposes perfectly. He'd be speaking as much to Aaron's subconscious as to his conscious mind.

"Stuart Jamison."

Hotch shook his head slightly.

"Grover Phipps."

"Sorry."

"Isaac Pringle." There was a twitch at the corner of Aaron's eye. "Anything?" he prompted.

"Haley's mom had a cat named Pringles. I dreamed about him the other night."

"And that's the only connection to him?"

"Well, twenty years ago I named my avatar in a computer game Pringles after the cat. I was thinking about that recently, too."

"What else have you been dreaming about lately?"

Hotch shrugged. "Stupid stuff. Nothing worth mentioning."

"If our positions were reversed," Dave said carefully, "what would you say to me now?"

Aaron sighed. "You're right. OK, I dream about failing. I dream a lot about failing. About making stupid mistakes." 

"Lately?"

Aaron hesitated. "About letting him die. About letting him fall, about not being able to keep my grip on his hands." He studied Dave for a long moment. "I also dream about a big fat guy in a black trench coat who follows me around, waiting for me to fail again."

Rossi kept his tone and his expression neutral. "Would it be reasonable to describe the man who imprisoned you as a big fat guy?"

Hotch became preoccupied with crushing the containers his snacks had come in into smaller and smaller shapes. "Let's finish the names," he said quietly. "I'm tired."

"That's fine," Dave said smoothly. "Gary Combs."

"Sorry."

"Arnold Rubey."

A shake of his head.

"Joseph McAfee."

"Sorry."

"James Collins."

Hotch glanced up. "I roomed with a Jim Collins at Yale my first year." His brows knit. "We had an UNSUB named James Collins, too, didn't we? Serial rapist in—Atlanta, right?"

Rossi didn't bother to disguise making a note that time. "Robert Alfano."

"Sorry."

"Charles Whitman."

"Texas Tower sniper," Aaron replied immediately. "Austin, August of 'sixty-six."

"This would obviously be a different Charles Whitman." 

"No."

"Dwight Hanlon."

"No."

"Louis Hillebrand."

Hotch shook his head one last time. "That's eleven, right?"

"It is indeed, Aaron. Now you need to get some rest." Rossi took a deep steadying breath and said, "You'll want to get your beauty sleep before Jack gets here."

There was a little start, then Hotch took a few breaths himself. "Every time I dream about Jack, either I wake up, or—he hates me."

Before Dave could say a thing, Morgan laughed and said, "I can testify, because I talked to him on the phone twice yesterday, that he's been dancing around the house singing, 'I'm gonna see my daddy, I'm gonna see my daddy,' pretty constantly."

"When will he be here?"

"Somewhere around eleven." Rossi gave a sudden gasp. "Oh! That reminds me—here." He took Aaron's wristwatch out of his pocket and handed it to him. "I don't know whether you can wear it comfortably over, over—you know—"

Hotchner shrugged. "Can't be as annoying as cuffs," he said, and slid it over his left hand carefully. "Three-nineteen?" he said. "Thursday morning, September sixteenth?"

"On the nose."

He smiled sleepily. "Next time that guy asks me what the date is, I'll be ready for him."

**~ o ~**

Technically it was Emily Prentiss's turn to sit with Hotch, especially since Rossi was pumped to follow the new leads he'd gotten from Aaron—a morbidly obese UNSUB and taking a second look at Isaac Pringle—but, _no_. Everybody, but _everybody,_ was jammed into the little hospital room on the fourth floor when Jessica Brooks showed up.

Aaron had slept fitfully from three-something to shortly after ten, when he'd awakened and allowed the day staff to help him take a shower.

When he'd emerged twenty minutes later, clean and brushed and shaved, he was limping, he was still battered and bruised, but he was _glowing_. "Hot shower," he'd moaned, in a voice that was nearly orgasmic. "Hot shower. Not even my best dreams had a hot shower and real shampoo."

"You, ah, used that Brunner crap on your hair, too?" Rossi had said.

Hotchner had given him a sharp look. "Picked up on that? Good."

"For what it's worth, we were getting close," Derek Morgan had added. "The soap, the 'white separatists' thing—we'd probably have been here within a couple more weeks. Reid's been working his way through the local militia groups who used Brunner's."

"Get me a little hair gel and my life'll be perfect," Hotch had sighed. Typical Hotch hyperbole, but it was good to hear. Emily had contributed a little purse-sized mousse that had done the job, allowing Aaron to skin back his hair at the temples the way he liked it.

She'd reached out impulsively then and hugged him. She'd expected the usual oak-board Aaron Hotchner—this was Hotch, after all, who, if there were an International Anti-Cuddler Championship, would place comfortably in the top five—but instead he'd hugged her back. Not hard, not easily, not even, truth be told, very well. But he'd returned the hug, and he'd smiled and murmured _Thank you_ in her ear.

Then the reception desk downstairs had called the nurses' station and Morgan sprinted down to meet them and bring them upstairs.

Hotch sat up, his feet over the side of the bed, with the bedclothes spread over his lap to hide the worst of the injuries to his shins. He was trying to look calm and he might have fooled a lot of people, but nobody on the Team. To them, he wore an enormous shiny halo of nervousness like a fifteen-year-old on his first date.

When they heard the elevator bell and Derek's voice in the hall, Aaron tensed up.

_He's afraid he'll wake up,_ Emily realized. _And afraid that Jack'll hate him._

No way. The timid little figure peered around the corner into the room, took in all the people he'd been spending so much time with recently, then zeroed in on the thin man on the bed and sprinted to him.

The explosion of hugging that ensued would have disqualified Hotch forever from the Anti-Cuddler League. The boy clung to him fiercely, monkey-like, with everything that could be wrapped around the frail body, and his father responded by holding him close and rocking him and sobbing, "I love you, Buddy, I love you," over and over.

Jessica stood at a distance, her clasped hands raised prayerfully to her lips as tears streamed down her face. After a moment, she turned slightly and gave Spencer Reid's hand a long, tight squeeze—_Hmm, that was interesting__, _Emily noted—then turned and beamed at the whole Team.

After that, well, everything kind of fell apart into laughing and smiling and more hugging than the Team generally got up to.

About twenty minutes later, it was clear that Hotch was tiring. Emily chased everyone out but Jess and Jack, and backed off into a corner to make sure that if a problem came up, someone was there to intervene. Jessica got a Netbook out of her bag that she'd loaded with videos she'd taken that year, before and after Aaron was taken. She set it up so Jack could lie next to his father and the two of them could watch the videos together. Then she dropped kisses on both of their foreheads and excused herself, saying she'd go and bag herself a cup of tea somewhere.

Emily thought she'd never seen anything so beautiful as the two Hotchner guys bonding quietly over the videos, a couple fart jokes, and the macaroni and cheese that the nursing staff had made sure was included in Aaron's lunch. Hotch eventually fell asleep, snoring lightly, with his head leaned on his son's. Jack looked knowingly at Emily and mimed _Shhh _to her, and called up some kid-friendly movies he'd obviously already known how to look for.

**~ o ~**

His roommate had been discharged. He was all alone in the seventh floor room.

Every muscle, every joint in his body ached ferociously, and he didn't think he would ever truly feel rested again. His mother had referred to house guests as people who made one "twice glad," as in, "glad to see 'em come, glad to see 'em go." He'd been delighted by his visitors, their sympathy, their hugs, their reassurances, but, oh, Lord, he was delighted to see them go.

At last he had his hospital room to himself, blessed, blessed quiet. He didn't manage fear well, but he managed it better when he was alone, when he didn't have to pretend to be cool and fearless.

He carefully inched his damaged left leg back under the covers, lay back, and reached for the remote. His shoulders were stiff and sore, his hands and his torso a mass of rope burns. He removed the cover from his plate—chopped sirloin, mashed potatoes, with steamed brussels sprouts on the side—and blinked wearily at the television set.

Top of the noon local news was the Yarberry Road Mudslide. They were still looking for old Mr. Dawes and for Deputy Pringle's rowdy, hate-spewing son, Isaac. Especially, it seemed, Ikey Pringle. He wondered what the hell that was about.

There was the obligatory formal Bureau portrait of Supervisory Special Agent in Charge Aaron Hotchner, but the man in the bed muted the TV for that story.

Eventually he knew they'd be here, the police, the Bureau, whatever SWAT they thought was required to bring down a fifty-nine—well, forty-nine really—year old man with a broken leg.

And then it would be all over for the former Norton Charpentier.

That was all right; he'd come to terms with it.


	45. Angles and Images

A/N: Here we are, in the home stretch, the last few chapters! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor! We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world. We continue battling health issues, both our own and those of our loved ones, but we're really pumped about seeing this through to its conclusion.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much! We cannot express adequately how tickled we are when people have read our story carefully enough that they've picked up the clues about what would happen next. We're delighted and honored and thrilled by your kindness and enthusiasm!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-Five**

**Angles and Images**

_The alley was dark, full of purple shadows and ominous angles, but Haley grinned evilly at him as she leaned her shoulders against a violet brick wall and rested her hands on his hips. He braced his own hands one on either side of her head and she thrust her pelvis against his. Their mouths met and he was throbbing—ye gods, she had him on the ragged edge of embarrassing himself._

He jerked and snorted and he was propped up in a hospital bed, his head against his son's fragrant hair. On the screen of a little notebook computer, he and Haley and Jack opened Christmas presents in Aaron's apartment that last Christmas, December of '08. They were divorced, but they always celebrated holidays together for Jack's sake. Haley opened the box with the silver silk blouse and squealed and hugged it to her breast and said, "You still have the best taste ever," and he looked at her and she looked at him and because Sean and Jack and his mother were there they didn't start their thing about _You taste pretty good, too_—at least, not aloud. Their eyes still said it, though.

_Hospital bed, my son beside me, I'm really here. And I have a fucking boner. Lizard Queen Liz Prentiss's daughter's sitting across from me, God only knows what she knows. Probably everything, by now. She'd be relentless in profiling me to identify my enemies._

_Down, boy! Down!_

"_The Lion King_," Jack murmured to him as he opened another file. Maybe he knew his father was awake; maybe he was just hoping. "'Member Uncle Sean doin' the hula?"

Oh, dear, yes. Sean Hotchner's imitation of Timon the Meerkat had to be seen and heard to be believed.

"He's funny," Aaron agreed. "He's good at being silly."

The video ended and Jack surveyed the large icons of other files. His tongue protruding adorably from the corner of his mouth, he moved the cursor over an image of himself, Sean, and Spencer Reid. "Want to see the ice show?" he asked.

"I'd love to," Aaron murmured. The situation down below was settling down, and he was once again sleepy.

_All I'm doing is sleeping._

Something orchestral and waltz-y started and multicolored spotlights flashed and dozens of skaters glided across the ice.

_He scrambled to pick up all the papers the wind had blown off his desk but as fast as he gathered them up, another gust roared through the window and sent still more cascading to the floor. When he got to the door to pick up the last ones he was staring at the shoes of the fat man in the black trench coat. He was on his knees in his office at the feet of the fat man and all he could do was stammer excuses and apologies. Then the lights went out and he couldn't breathe. Ice had entered his lungs and it burned, his chest was being crushed. He knew he was dying and he was exhausted from fighting it. He consciously surrendered to the blackness, but no, someone yanked him out of the water, up onto all fours. "Can't die!" a voice roared at him. "You have a family! You have a life! You have a profession!" He vomited vile, filthy _something_ back into the water, and gunk ran from his eyes, nose, and mouth. He vomited until he was sure his body would break apart from the violence of the spasms. "Better," the voice told him, more gently now. "Let it all out, just let it all out."_

And he was in a hospital bed beside his son, appalled to discover that he had slid downward and was huddled in a fetal position. Jack regarded him with wide-eyed alarm. He wondered what he'd said, what he'd done.

"He'll be all right," the voice of Penelope Garcia said, firmly and soothingly. "I think he just had a bad dream, honey. He's gonna be having bad dreams for a little while longer."

Jack patted his father's face gently. "Dreams help us throw away the bad stuff," he told Aaron solemnly—precisely as Aaron'd counseled Jack after the boy's own nightmares.

Aaron smiled up at his son. "I love you," he whispered.

"Yeah," Jack replied serenely. "I love you, too. You want to see some SpongeBob? Ms. Garcia says they gots wi-fis here."

"Would _love_ to see some SpongeBob," Hotch mumbled contentedly.

"I have an assignment for you first," said Penelope in her don't-screw-with-me voice.

He opened his eyes and looked at the tech analyst, who was standing beside the bed with her hands on her hips. "Go for it."

"Tell me one specific thing about where you spent the last four months," she said. "I know that it'll be minor and neutral because Jack's here, and that's just fine, because that's where we're gonna start."

He elevated one eyebrow. "Oh, you're an interrogator now?"

Garcia seated herself primly in her chair. "No, I'm not. And I never will be. And that's what makes me a nice, safe person to talk to. I won't take any BS, but I won't ever play games with you."

He glanced quickly at Emily, who raised her palms and shook her head in the universal _hey-leave-me-out-of-this_ gesture.

_I love these people. With all my heart, I love these people._

"Fine," he said with a sigh. "I was seventy-four feet underground. There were 473,600 pounds of rock over me."

Her eyes narrowed behind her cat glasses. "Granite's more like one-sixty to the cubic foot," she said finally. "So, ah, that's something like 760,000 pounds."

"Thank you," he muttered. "I feel so much better now."

**~ o ~**

Somewhere between two and three in the afternoon (nobody, least of all Garcia, was keeping a close watch on the time) Jess collected Jack so Spencer Reid could drive them to the Blair County motel that had their reservations, promising to return later in the evening.

When Prentiss and Garcia returned from seeing them onto the elevator, they found Hotchner sitting up in bed with his legs drawn up tight to his chest and his arms wrapped around his shins. It was an odd posture—a childlike posture—for such a formal man. He wore a look of intense concentration.

_Time to distract him._

Penelope sat down and straightened her skirt over her knees. "Time for another question," she said in her brightest tones. "Ready?"

Hotch looked at her with what seemed like unutterable weariness. "Sure," he sighed.

He probably thought that she would be throwing out questions randomly. Not a chance—she'd spent the better part of the night sitting up in her noisy, vaguely mildewy motel room, nibbling hard candies and drinking mediocre coffee—and making endless lists of possible areas of exploration. She hadn't been in la-la-land when the Team discussed interrogation techniques, and she'd read a little on her own.

"Tell me something you did with your legal pads in your cell," she said, smiling as warmly as she could.

Aaron's eyes widened a little—_I've intrigued him_—and he rested his chin on his right knee, the one that was less seriously damaged.

"One thing?"

"One thing," she assured him.

"OK. I made a list," he said hesitantly. "I started it the first week I was there, and I was still adding to it—um, probably last week; I've lost some time there. I put together a list of all the people I could think of who'd been taken prisoner."

Before Garcia could say anything encouraging about that exposition, he continued, his voice soft and thoughtful. "I reminded myself about how long they were held, about what had been done to them, about how they'd been controlled and disciplined. About how old they were and how much or how little they understood about what was happening to them and why."

_And then?_ she thought. _And then? Did you compare their situation to your own? Did you __jump all over yourself when you were as scared as they were?_

Everything in her simply screamed to ask a followup question, but she retained self-control.

"Thank you," she said. She smiled brightly at Aaron, huddled on his bed in such a withdrawn and uncomfortable position. "Do you have a question for me?" 

After a moment's thought, Hotchner said, "How did you find out I was here?"

She wondered how best to phrase it. "You gave the refugee center Morgan's cell number."

Hotch stared moodily at nothing, apparently considering that. "Thank you," he said at last. "I don't remember that yet, but—obviously it worked." He hugged his shins tighter and hunched his shoulders. "Are we done, or do you plan to ask another question?"

"I have a question," Emily said. Penelope schooled her features, not about to show annoyance at Prentiss's interference in her own plan.

Hotch blinked at her. "Ask."

"Tell me what, if anything, any of these six names means to you: Roberta Ann Laskey. Erwin McKenzie. Brenda Hawthorne. Theodore Hawthorne. Oscar Santini. Lowell Branch."

"Nothing, sorry." A hesitation. "Was one of those people the one I gave Morgan's number to?"

Prentiss visibly relaxed. "I believe so, yes."

He nodded slightly. "Thank you."

"Are you willing to answer another question?"

"One," he said. "Really. Just one. Getting tired again."

Then this was it, one of the really ugly ones, the ones that would surely tie Hotch up in knots, overcome by guilt at being unable to save Warden, who surely was screaming for help. "Just this one, and I'm grateful for your patience. What's the last thing you can remember saying to Warden?"

Aaron's features reflected misery and guilt. "I said, 'Hang on,'" he said in a low, miserable whisper. "I told him I wouldn't let go. He kept—kept telling me to go on, that as long as I kept heading up and to my right I would eventually reach the road. And I kept saying 'Shut up and hold on!'" His eyes glistened and he averted his face. "I said shut up and hang on, goddammit!' Those are the last words he heard from me."

He unfolded himself from his cramped position and lowered the headboard all the way. "And now I have—a lot of new images and sense-memories I need to think about," he said, his voice thick and sluggish. "And I need to lie down. No, wait: Do I get one last question, too?"

"Of course," Penelope assured him.

He reclined on his right elbow, protective, as all hospital patients are, of the hand with the IV running into it, and looked at her with sad, solemn eyes. "Did your parents call you Penny, or Pen, or did they always say 'Penelope'?"

Not only was that nothing like any question she'd expected in this context, but nobody—_nobody_—in the BAU had ever asked her that question before.

"I was named after my great-grandma," she replied carefully. "She was called Nellie for short. My folks called me Nell. But Pen is great," she hastened to add as she sensed Emily starting to tense up. "I'm Pen here and I love it. Really. No worries."

Hotchner nodded. "Nell," he said. "That's kind of sweet. Old-fashioned. Tell you what, Garcia, ask me another question, because I have another for you."

_Which one to follow up on? The list, or Warden?_ She thought of asking Emily, but decided, no, she would do this on her own. "On the first of the two videos," she said carefully, and she saw the way his jaw tightened, "you seemed to be—_reciting_ something. What was that all about?"

Aaron's whole body was tense now. "Not comfortable answering that," he said. "Not right now."

Penelope's heart broke, but she made herself stay firm. "I said no games and no BS," she said carefully, respectfully. "So, if you want to ask a question, you have to answer one."

"Then ask another one."

"Who was Warden?"

Hotch's face was a mask. "He was Warden. It was his role."

"But who was he?"

"He was Warden," Aaron repeated, his eyes averted and his tone wooden. "I was Prisoner. Neither of us had an identity outside of our roles. My turn."

"Your turn," Garcia affirmed.

"How did I get to the center, whatever it was called?"

Penelope sighed and turned to Emily, who said, "A retired couple found you on their property. They bundled you up and drove you to the refugee center."

Hotchner stared at the wall for a long moment. When he spoke again, his tone was quiet and sorrowful. "I don't remember that at all. I don't remember anything after—after Warden fell, except climbing and getting lost and turned around and nothing made sense. Directions didn't make sense. It was dark, and the rain was just—fucking relentless, just constant. And cold. Jesus, I was freezing, and we lost the last of the blankets when the, when the—something collapsed in the mine in the dark. And up wasn't up, down wouldn't stay down, and I kept climbing and sliding and falling and—sometimes I thought I heard cars. Vehicles. I heard a siren once, I'm sure I did."

Garcia felt herself tensing and fought it: Whatever was going on in Aaron Hotchner's mind, he had almost automatically reverted to that odd posture, sitting with his legs drawn up and his arms around them.

"_And we lost the last of the blankets when the…something collapsed in the mine…."_ More data than they'd had a minute ago. Maybe more data than he'd realized he still had access to.

Emily broke the silence. "Well, you never made it to the road, but you were close to the top of the mountain."

Another vague, distant nod, but Hotch didn't say another word. He groped for the edge of the bedclothes, lowered himself to his side, and pulled the covers over himself.

Garcia thought maybe he was falling asleep, but just as she opened up her laptop, his voice came, sleepy and reflective. "So—those two names you asked me about that had the same surname—" He was obviously addressing Prentiss. "That was the retired couple?"

"Right," Emily said. "Theodore and Brenda Hawthorne. Do the names mean something to you now?"

"No," he mumbled. "I wish they did."

_Just as well they don't,_ Garcia thought with a frustrated sigh. _It would just complicate stuff even more._ She'd found nothing even remotely creepy or suspect about them. Retired academics, back-to-the-landers (but not all religious about it) volunteers in the community. Sociable, frugal, politically centrist with a dash of liberal, which would disqualify them in the eyes of the local crazies. Boring.

**~ o ~**

"I feel so stupid," she told her husband as they got out of the elevator on the fourth floor. "He's practically a celebrity, and I can't even imagine what he's been through all these months. We'll just give him the planter and the coffee cake and we'll leave."

"Fine," Ted said with a sigh. "But wouldn't it be nice if we could see him all cleaned up? We could get the images from the other night out of our heads forever. Besides, he probably isn't conscious yet—and they'll be serving dinner soon."

"But they called up to the room, and _somebody_ approved us coming up," Bren insisted.

"And your point is?"

She ignored him, looking at room numbers. They passed _422, 424, 426, 428_. "There," she hissed. She could see a pale man with dark hair in the far bed.

"Hello, again," a pleasant voice said to their left. A man with warm brown skin and a shaved head beamed at them. He shook hands with Ted, and said, "You must be Brenda. I'm Agent Derek Morgan."

"We don't mean to intrude," Bren told him.

He had a strange way of blowing her off: He closed his eyes before he shook his head, then opened them. "No intrusion," he assured her. "Come on in. Hotch," he said in a somewhat louder voice. "Hotch, this is Dr. Theodore Hawthorne and Dr. Brenda Hawthorne. Doctors in the Spencer Reid sense, not physicians. Dr. Theodore was the one you gave my number to. Ma'am, sir, Supervisory Special Agent in Charge Aaron Hotchner."

The pale man in the bed by the window sat up, then raised his headboard. He tried to extend his right hand with its IV tubing to Ted, then murmured, "Sorry—I'm a southpaw," and held out his left instead for an awkward handshake. "I hate that damn thing. So you're the person I talked to?"

"Yep," Ted said. "You're looking a whole lot better there."

In terms of the purely physical, he still looked dreadful, but seeing life and intelligence in his dark eyes, and hearing a velvety deep baritone speaking coherently, went a long way toward banishing the imagery from the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

Hotchner smiled faintly, probably trying for polite. "I don't know what I looked like, but I'll take your word for it."

"We don't want to keep you," Bren started, feeling strangely shy. "We just brought a little something to brighten your stay."

"Please stay a few minutes," the agent said. "I'd enjoy talking a little with you."

"You're sounding better, too," Ted said. "Making more sense."

_How bizarre is this?_ Bren thought to herself in profound wonder. _Just a couple months ago, I'm helping Sarge play detective, trying to deduce where an FBI agent is being held captive. Now it turns out he was locked up practically under my nose._

_Not locked up; tied up,_ she corrected herself, _noticing the shiny pink scar tissue around the man's wrists. Poor thing, they beat the hell out of him, and here I thought that was flood damage._

For one terrifying, dizzying instant, she wondered whether Joe McAfee might have anything to do with this. _But he's the gentlest man alive,_ she reminded herself, _and they're talking about hate groups, and I've never seen the first whiff of intolerance about him. Heck, at least one of his girlfriends is black!_

The agent lifted the foil pie plate that held the coffee cake she'd made for him. "This looks wonderful," he said. "Blueberries, cinnamon, walnuts—" He sniffed. "Is that cream cheese?"

She beamed in spite of herself. "You have a good nose. There's crushed cashews in there, too." He seemed so friendly, so pleasant, that she added, "We have a distant relationship, one of those six-degrees-of-separation things, by the way. My sorority sister, Carol Emerson, has a little sister Lily, who—"

"Lily Emerson?" Aaron Hotchner looked pleased. "Bright, very talented woman. Is she still married to, ah, Chuck Leland, no, it's—"

"Chan," Bren said, pleased at this small connection. "Channing or Chandler, one or the other. Three daughters, nice house near Virginia Beach."

"She deserves good things to come to her," the agent assured her. He looked at both of them for what seemed like a long time, then said, "Would you mind telling me how and where you found me?"

"We already told that agent," Ted said, and Bren was surprised. He sounded as bashful as she felt. "Agent Morgan."

"I spoke to Mr.—to Agent Rossi," she said. "Nice man. Very observant."

"I'm just trying to understand what happened to me," the FBI agent before her said. "Trying to picture it in my mind. There are still a lot of chunks missing in my memory."

Bren looked nervously at Morgan, who nodded.

"I went out to check something in the trunk of my car," Ted began, typical freaking engineer, _always_ had to start at the beginning, no matter what. Sometimes she just wanted to shoot him an elbow to the ribs and snarl, _Get to the point, Teddy!_

"Heavy thunder and lightning," he was saying, "and one of 'em must've hit within a quarter mile or so, completely simultaneous with the thunder, and it lit the place up white, bleached out most of the color, but I saw a little bit of purple out of the corner of my one eye in a place where there shouldn't oughta be purple, you know what I mean? But by the time it registered on me, everything was black again. I kept looking, to see if it was replicable, and next flash, I saw it again. Got the heavy flashlight out of the car and went exploring.

"You were hung up on a piece of root," he continued. "Your shirt was, I mean, the back of the collar. You were looking pretty torn up. I went back in and got Bren, since I figured it was a two-person job. We wrapped you in blankets and carried you up to the car. Bren drove, and I sat in back with you, trying to get some kind of ID from you. All you gave me was numbers," he finished. "I scribbled 'em on the back of a deposit slip and when we got to the center, I gave the slip to Bobbie Ann. End of story."

On the one hand, she was a little annoyed that he'd told the whole story himself. On the other, she was a little grateful that he'd told it. She'd probably have gotten herself all hyper-detailed, like yesterday, God, actually telling Agent Rossi that she'd seen the poor man's genitals. Lord, what she wouldn't give to take _those_ words back….

There were a few minutes more of pleasantries—Hotchner asked what Ted's and her areas of expertise were and asked her where she got the recipe for the blueberry cream cheese coffee cake; Ted asked him about his own academic background, and he'd said an undergrad psych degree and then law school—then the towering carts of patient dinners rattled in the halls.

Agent Hotchner nodded to Ted and squeezed Bren's hand, telling them he was glad to have met them. "I'm told I wouldn't have lasted much longer out there," he confided.

"Yeah, hypothermia can nail ya at fifty degrees, easy, if you're wet and you can't get shelter from the wind," Ted agreed.

_You weren't supposed to agree with him, she thought at her annoyingly literal husband._

She was grateful when they were able to make a courteous exit.

**~ o ~**

Rossi was in the waiting room at the end of the hall, raining angry birds and bombs down on a bunch of smug, self-satisfied, egg-stealing pigs, when Morgan, carrying two plastic grocery bags, entered and sat down beside him. "Hey," he said.

"Hey," Rossi replied. Since it was obvious from his tone and body language that Derek wanted to talk, Dave closed the game and faced the acting Unit Chief. "What's up?"

"Just spoke to Dr. Wu," Morgan said. "Hotch's been getting quieter and quieter as the day's gone on. I figured it's mostly because he's starting to face reality, getting memories back, but I wanted to make sure it's OK for us to push him a little. Wu said that we probably know as much as he does about interviewing traumatized people, so we can start talking to him about what went on down there. He does say, keep it short, especially at the beginning."

Rossi nodded. "Reasonable. When do you want to start?"

Morgan met his gaze. "How about now?"

"I thought Jessica and Jack—"

"Jack's kind of overwhelmed and it's been a long day, starting with a long drive. He pooped out right after dinner. They're putting him to bed, then—" Morgan hesitated. "Garcia's gonna stay with Jack. Reid and Jess are driving into Altoona to see a movie."

Rossi raised an elegant eyebrow. _They're certainly not trying very hard to keep it a secret anymore_, he thought. "My, that's—gracious of him. Or her. Whoever's paying."

"Dave, is there something I should know going on there?"

Rossi gave Morgan his best Cheshire Cat grin. "All I know for _sure_ is that they're taking in a movie together. But she's a fine-looking woman."

Morgan did _not_ look happy about that. "And he's a skinny guy who's, what, ten years younger?"

"Something like that. But he's no kid. And she's not Bureau, so it isn't fraternization."

Derek still radiated annoyance. "Hey, I caught five kinds of hell for having _coffee_ with the sister of a victim last year. And Hotch is still technically the _victim_ here."

"It's a lot more complicated than that," Rossi said with a sigh. "Come on, let's go talk to Hotch." Rather than argue any further, he just rose to his feet and popped his iPad back into his bag. Morgan had little choice other than to stay in his seat and make an issue out of it, or follow him back to the hospital room. Not surprisingly, he opted to return to Aaron's bedside.

**~ o ~**

In Room 430, Aaron Hotchner popped a straw into his pineapple juice container. He'd been free since, oh, probably some time Tuesday, so two days, but he still couldn't bring himself to drink caffeinated beverages. It had taken so long to shake the withdrawal headache when he first arrived at the bunker that he hesitated to start into the habit again.

He'd been alone for eighteen minutes, not nearly enough time for him to come to any firm conclusions about anything—except that he was painfully confused.

He was pretty sure that in a minute or so, Morgan'd be back in the room, probably with Dave as backup. But Aaron no longer had any answers for himself, let alone the Team.

The Hawthornes, seemingly a very nice, ordinary couple, had found him, torn up, freezing, and incoherent, at the top of a hill, and had delivered him to the center.

And he had given Theodore Hawthorne Derek's number.

It was programmed into his smartphone and he had it written in his wallet as one of his two emergency contact numbers, but if anyone had asked him for it, he would've had to look it up.

_He didn't know it. Never had._


	46. Entertaining a Few Alternatives

A/N: Galloping toward the climax, but still a few surprises in store for you and for our favorite agents! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much! We cannot express adequately how tickled we are when people have read our story carefully enough that they've picked up the clues about what would happen next. We're delighted and honored and thrilled by your kindness and enthusiasm!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-Six**

**Entertaining a Few Alternatives**

Brenda Hawthorne really hated coincidences. They happened, they happened at all the wrong times, and they lay in wait to trip up well-meaning historians. Sometimes, when she was sounding off on what she considered the historian's version of the scientific method, she'd tell her students, "Be courageous. Open your minds. Entertain a few alternatives."

Now, as she sat in the passenger seat next to her husband, en route to State College with her second planter of the day on the floor at her feet and another coffee cake on her lap, she contemplated coincidences. The fact, for instance, that while the FBI agent lay in Huntingdon County's hospital, Joe McAfee lay in a hospital in Centre County, where he'd been injured in an auto accident around the same general time.

_Be courageous. Entertain the alternatives, woman._

Sarge had a list of cases that Aaron Hotchner had prosecuted in the early and mid-Nineties, yet Hotchner's name hadn't appeared on the list, even for the cases where he'd been the lead prosecutor. Sarge had never explicitly told her that he was trying to figure out where the FBI agent was being held captive, she realized grimly. She'd made that interpretation all by herself; he'd merely agreed with her.

_Worse_, she realized, with a chill so severe that it shot through her like a lightning bolt, _that wasn't even Joe's handwriting! _Joe's penmanship was far from perfect, but it was nothing like those, those chicken-scratches on the list.

Worse still, she realized that she'd seen that same awful writing in Agent Hotchner's hospital room. She'd seen it out of the corner of her eye, and—being the kind of person who can't help it, she just instinctively read everything she saw—she had read, scrawled on the menu request form for the bed designated 430-2, _Extra butter, please. Thanks for the mac and cheese! _It had taken some effort to decipher it.

So way back in—what was it, June? Had to be June, right?—Joe McAfee'd had a list of Aaron Hotchner's cases as a prosecutor, written in Hotchner's own handwriting. Put that together with the discovery that the poor man had been held captive in a cave practically under their own house, and, _Oh, Joe, what did you do? What in God's name got into you?_

Oh, but it got worse—much, much worse.

She stared straight ahead at traffic, at the inevitable rain on the windshield.

_He saw a flash of purple when the lightning flashed. Not bloody likely, as my mother would have said. _

She had a far better color sense than Ted did, and even she hadn't recognized the color of the man's scrubs as purple until she was right on top of him. They were wet and they looked black.

_This is taking me places I don't want to go._

And as she drove through the deluge that night, she had heard Ted talking to the man, but all she had heard from their passenger had been faint mewling cries. After a while, she'd heard nothing at all from him.

But it was Ted, hard-of-hearing Ted, who'd somehow made sense out of the sounds Agent Hotchner was making. And it was Ted who'd told the story to the agent, so direct and so thorough and above all, so _and that's it. End of story._

_What does he know that he isn't telling me? _

_And if Hotchner didn't give him the number, who could have?_

"Penny for your thoughts," the love of her life said from behind the wheel.

"Just—entertaining alternatives," she said, struggling to keep her emotions in check.

He squeezed her hand and she returned the squeeze.

_And they're taking me nowhere,_ she thought with a sigh. _If after forty-three years I don't know Teddy Hawthorne, I don't know anyone at all._

**~ o ~**

Aaron's greeting was subdued, not much more than a nod and a wave. It was evident from his expression that he knew why they were there. Dave didn't expect him to argue about it; he'd been on the other end of it his entire professional life, up to and including interviewing injured Team members. They could count on him to be a good boy and get with the program.

"Brought you the paper plates you asked for," Morgan announced, "the Sierra Mist, and the V-8 Fusion. I didn't know you liked it; never saw you drink it."

"Got used to it—there," Hotchner said without much energy. "The V-8 Fusion, I mean. Warden usually included it in his food deliveries."

"How was your dinner?" Rossi asked. Aaron's meal tray had already been removed, but he still sipped pineapple juice through a straw from a wax container.

"Fine," he said. "I ate more of it than I thought I would."

"What are the paper plates for?"

"The coffee cake. Try some; you'll love it." He gestured toward the foil-and-plastic-wrapped dessert on his window sill. "I even saved my knife."

He watched them intently as they seated themselves, as they sliced themselves pieces of the coffee cake—which was, in fact, superb—as they dusted the crumbs from themselves and disposed of their paper plates. He showed little and said nothing of import, but he was clearly expecting the beginning of formal questioning.

When dessert was done and the mood in the room began to shift, he pushed the button that lowered his headboard a few inches and arranged his—_four. He has four pillows. What's that all about?_—pillows all around himself. Then he took a long drink of his juice and looked back and forth between them. "What do you want to know?" he said finally.

"Let's start with basics," Derek said, taking the lead role. "We'll start easy, with just a few questions."

Although Rossi was arguably the finest interrogator the Bureau had, they'd found that having Derek ask the questions and Dave watch and evaluate the subject's body language worked well for them as a team. Aaron and Dave had done the same thing, so Hotch would be aware of it, but that was unavoidable.

"Fine," Hotch said. His entire attention was focused on Derek. He seemed tense but not fearful—consistent with someone who doesn't look forward to discussing a topic. "I'm ready."

"How many prisoners were there?"

There was a long, uncharacteristically silent moment. "I know about one other," Aaron said finally. "He died."

"What can you tell us about him?"

"I never saw him. Never spoke to him. He was a lawyer. Retired lawyer. Warden told me later that he was dead." As an attorney and an agent, Aaron Hotchner had learned to control his body language and his facial expressions. Anyone just entering the room would think he was completely relaxed and forthright. Rossi and Morgan, who'd worked beside him for years, could tell that he wasn't. He was acutely uncomfortable and on the ragged edge of misleading them.

But why? Guilt? Shame? Fear?

But they weren't supposed to push him—not yet. Give him another forty-eight hours, and if he wasn't forthcoming by then, they'd give him reason to be proud of how well he'd trained the Team to take no crap from anyone, including him.

Derek shifted directions, but not much. "How many people were involved in your captivity?"

Hotchner wasn't fooled, but there wasn't a whole lot he could do about it. He crushed his juice container and shoved his tray-table aside. "My interactions were limited exclusively to my Warden. I'm sure others were involved at some stage, but I don't know how many, or in what capacity."

"_My" Warden. Interesting._

"And you're sure of that." Rossi wondered whether he'd have to rein Morgan in; he was pretty intense.

"Yes, sir."

All three men were still for a few seconds at that _sir. _Aaron broke the silence himself. "Habit," he said quietly. "Ignore it."

"How many people were in the prison when you left it?"

Hotch shook his head and seemed troubled. "Not clear on that. It was called a bunker, by the way. Usually I was the only person there."

"Let's skip back to the beginning for a bit," Morgan said smoothly. "What do you remember about your abduction?"

Hotchner stared into space for a long minute, gnawing lightly on his lip, then said, "The truck. The blue truck." He spoke slowly, reflectively, as though picturing it in his mind. "Cattle prod on the dashboard. Being drugged, blindfolded, shocked. At some point I was forced to walk through something, I think it was a field, from the truck to a car, four-door sedan, I think. Fairly new. It smelled new. I was blindfolded all the time by then. By then, I was with the man I came to know as Warden."

"The man who abducted you wasn't Warden?"

Hotchner considered that. "I don't think so, but I'm not sure. I don't remember much at all of the person who took me, just fragments. I've even made lists, trying to analyze it. Even their tactics were different. The first one, he was all about shocking the crap out of me. The second kept me tied up and blindfolded, and used the Enforcer only once."

"The Enforcer?"

Hotch nodded grimly. "The cattle prod. That's what they called it. I remember thinking, back when—back in May—that he was probably the kind of guy who named his penis."

"Did you—" Morgan hesitated. "Did you by chance mention this to the man who abducted you?"

Rossi watched Aaron consciously taking himself back to a place he didn't want to be. "I don't know," he said finally. "I don't think so. He—the man with the truck—he pretty quickly put me in a place where I had no interest in antagonizing him. I think he threatened Jack, or Jess, or both of them."

"But you're not sure?"

Hotch considered that. "I'm close to sure. I—I'm sure there was a threat, but I'm having trouble recalling its precise nature. I think—maybe—something about explosives." His face was troubled. "But it's almost a guess."

_Explosives again._ Warden was supposed to have booby-trapped the place where Aaron was held. And Rossi recalled standing in Hotch's driveway with the Team and speculating that there'd been a threat to Aaron's loved ones. _Something else we got right. _

"We saw the security footage," Morgan was saying. "The guy we were calling Fuzz Face did seem pretty attached to using the, ah, the Enforcer."

Aaron's brows knit together. "Fuzz Face?"

"From the old-fashioned whiskers? The big-ass sideburns?"

"I—I'm sorry, I'm sure I saw them, but apparently they didn't register permanently." Aaron seemed chagrined, almost embarrassed by that. "All I really recall is glasses and jeans and the fucking Enforcer." After a few seconds, he added thoughtfully, "And work boots. Scuffed brown work boots.

"I'm sorry," he blurted, "I was trying to notice everything, but a lot of it is just a blur of pain and confusion and—and fear."

"You're doing fine," Morgan assured him, his voice warm and empathetic. "You're doing just fine, Hotch. Let's talk a little more about this guy or these guys. Did they talk to you at all?"

"Only to give orders, generally. It's hard to piece it together; the drugs made it hard to keep my concentration up. I can tell you that they were educated, intelligent, confident. The first one, he seemed amused at having me. The second, he seemed more goal-directed, serious about it. I was supposed to be silent unless I was asked a direct question—but if I asked for permission to speak, sometimes that was allowed."

"What do you remember about talking to them?"

There was a long, uncomfortable silence, then, his voice very low, Aaron said, "I asked him—the person who had me—not to shock me anymore. The last shocks had been—more than I could take. I told him I'd try to do anything he told me to do."

Aaron seemed embarrassed by that, and Rossi wanted to leap up and shake some sense into him, to scream, _You're not fuckin' Superman, Aaron!_ How many times had Hotch reassured the victims he was interviewing that it was perfectly normal to bargain, to recognize their own limits? That there was no shame in doing whatever it took to survive?

As though he'd read Rossi's mind, Hotchner said, "Yeah. I know. Anyway—later on, I asked, was he sure he had the right person, and he said, _'__Yes, you used to be Aaron Hotchner.__'_" He took a deep breath. "I asked him who I was now, and he said that I was nobody. That when we arrived, I would become Prisoner."

Aaron was clearly way out of his comfort zone by this point, eye contact completely absent, his hands fidgeting with his bedclothes, with the pillows, with the little plastic bracelet around his left wrist. He'd removed his wristwatch, Rossi noted.

"OK, you're doing great," Morgan said, leaning in, encouraging and intimate. "We'll stop soon; I just have two more questions."

Hotch nodded, his relief subtle but unmistakable.

"OK, you're in the car. How did you get from the car to the—to the bunker?"

"I—he—it's definitely Warden by now—he gave me another shot," he said. "When I woke up I was in the cell already."

Morgan reached down to his briefcase and took out the three sketches they had of the general layout of the bunker. He moved Hotch's pitcher and water glass to one side and set them on the tray in front of him. "What can you tell me about these?"

Hotchner looked at all three of them carefully. "Where'd you get these?"

"They're drawn from memory by three former members of the Shield of Yahweh," Morgan explained.

"That would be—the white supremacist group?"

Morgan nodded. "It would."

Aaron looked at them again, then selected one. "This is the closest to the area I was aware of," he said. "This was the cell, this was—it was supposed to be a place to imprison federal troops originally—they were going to call it Andersonville II—but it was an exercise area for me. Treadmill, horizontal bar, some weights. This door over here," he tapped the far end of the diagram, "I think that's the way we used to get out of there."

"You and Warden."

"Yes, sir." He sighed slightly, then shrugged.

"And you're sure—"

"I'm not done with the drawings," Aaron said. "This was a sheer rock wall," he continued. "I was given a pickaxe and allowed to whack at it, like a miner, to get my aggressions and my frustrations out. This area over here—it wasn't illuminated, so I can't tell you anything about it. I knew there was a second cell, but I was never at an angle where I could see it."

"One more question—"

"You already asked two, Morgan," Aaron said with a sigh. "I can still count."

"And here's a third," Derek insisted smoothly. "Answer it, or let it go. Who was Warden?"

Aaron stared at the wall for a long time, sitting perfectly still. Finally, he shook his head. "I can tell you what kind of person he was—smart, organized, thorough, but I don't know what name he was using outside the bunker." He looked up then, met Morgan's eyes, then Rossi's. "And that's as far as I'm prepared to go at this time."

"Oh, come on, Aaron—"

"And he had a major stellium in Capricorn," Hotchner said, not without amusement.

"He—what?"

"A major stellium in Capricorn. He said it explained a lot about him. He claimed that I have one in Sagittarius, and that explains a lot about me."

"He believes in astrology?" Rossi interrupted, unable to keep the amusement out of his voice.

"I suppose." His body language suggested misdirection, but neither Rossi nor Morgan chose to challenge him at this time.

"And that's all you can tell us?"

Hotchner met Derek's eyes with an exhausted sigh. "This is what I can tell you, Morgan. The only person I had any interaction with in the bunker called himself Warden," he said. "Every fucking time, he would ask me my name and I would say _Prisoner, sir._ Then he would ask his name, and I'd say _Warden, sir._ Then he'd have me read those sonofabitching statements."

"Which made no sense to us," Morgan contributed.

Once again, perhaps without realizing it, Hotchner assumed that strange posture reminiscent of children—or inmates in third world prisons. His expression was almost blank, and his voice grew low and heavy.

"He was an avenger-type UNSUB," he said, speaking with slow deliberation. "He was out to avenge prosecutorial injustices, and he had me nailed for mine." He met their eyes, Rossi's first, then Morgan's.

Morgan, clearly struck as speechless as Rossi, just sat there and stared at Aaron.

"And now, it's _over_. I'm _through_," Hotchner said with calm certainty. "I have nothing more to say to you tonight." He looked up at Rossi, not Morgan. "_Please_ leave me alone."

**~ o ~**

_Si può? Si può?  
>Signore! Signori!<em>

He opened one eye and looked at the silly little machine—it looked like something that might sit in the middle of Darth Vader's chest—and thought about nudging the button that would send a little shot of on-demand morphine through his veins. Like everything in life, it had a minus side as well as its obvious kill-the-pain-at-the-surgical-site plus side: He felt that he should be at his mental best, or at least as much so as possible, when they arrived to arrest him.

He sighed and closed his eyes. _No morphine. Occupy your mind; continue with _I Pagliacci.

He envisioned Tonio, in the suit, but not the makeup, of a clown. Although there were several baritones whose renditions he preferred, he chose to picture Sherrill Milnes this evening, in light blue silk pantaloons and a puffy shirt worn open, as though he'd wandered out of his dressing room in mid-motley. Should he have a piece of cloth in his hand, stained tan and white and red as though he'd been in the act of removing his makeup—or perhaps patting perspiration from his face in preparation for applying it? Or would that be pushing the edge of the ol' _verismo_ envelope too far?

Designing fantasy operatic productions, from casting to sets to the finest details of direction, could engage him so thoroughly that he barely noticed the pain in his leg, his head, his ribs.

_Scusatemi  
>se da sol me presento.<br>Io sono il Prologo!_

Drop the spots from three to two, from above and low left, casting shadows across the face of the baritone. Wistful expression—Milnes didn't do wistful well, but, _ehhh_—

_Poiché in iscena ancor  
>le antiche maschere mette l'autore,<br>in parte ei vuol riprendere  
>le vecchie usanze<em>—

There was a tapping on the door jamb of his room.

"Joe?" Brenda Hawthorne said, her face reflecting her dismay at his condition. "Mind if we come in for a few minutes?"

_God._

_This is going to be harder than the arrest. Infinitely harder._

He groped for and found the button that raised his headboard. "Bren! Ted!" he managed to mumble—_more morphine in me than I realized_—and he forced himself to smile at the two people he considered his best friends in this life, in the identity he was about to surrender. "If that has blueberries in it, Brenda, you've made me a happy man. I'll be doing wind sprints down the halls in half an hour."

He looked for a comfortable position, and as ever, settled for a less-uncomfortable one. "How are you doing?" he asked.

"We're doing fine," Bren said, pulling up the smaller of the two visitors' chairs beside his bed. "I see you're all on your lonesome in here."

"Mm-hm, my roomie got sprung this morning. They said I'll be getting another roommate soon, though." He glanced up at Ted, still clinging to a planter as though to a lifeline. "Hey, Ted." _Might as well get this party started_. "Do you still have the envelope?"

The towering retired engineer looked startled. _He didn't expect me to mention it in front of Bren._ "No," he replied, avoiding eye contact. "I destroyed it. Seemed redundant, under the circumstances."

The man they knew as Joseph McAfee caught the quick look Bren gave her husband—_she suspects something but she hasn't discussed it with him yet_—and sighed slightly, carefully. Even breathing was a challenge now.

"Might've been better to keep it," he said. "Would've been proof of your non-involvement. It's only a matter of days, maybe hours."

"I don't think so," Ted said. "We were interviewed on Wednesday morning, and we were just up to see him, over at St. Vee Cent, and your name never came up."

"But it does have to come up," McAfee said.

Ted nodded. "That it does. But you have a little time, looks like. You can do some recovery work."

"The longer my name stays out of it, the more potential culpability you're looking at for yourself."

Bren looked between the two men with something like panic, but Ted just shrugged. "Way I see it, he's out, you ain't going anywhere, nothing I have to say contributes substantially to the database."

"Stop it," Bren said, her voice low but intense. "Don't talk in circles around me like I'm some damn Irish Setter puppy. I have it figured out. You had Agent Hotchner all that time. You had that poor man in the caves under Blue Bauman. You were visiting us more often because you were—what, feeding and watering your new pet? Is that how you looked at it?—and somehow you sucked Teddy into it."

"Yes," he answered, and it caught her flatfooted. Probably she was expecting something a bit more self-serving, something a different shade of truth.

"'Yes,'" she echoed finally. "That's all you have to say?"

He tried to shrug. It didn't work. "It's a start."

She burst unexpectedly into tears. "Joe, Joe," she whispered, dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled tissue. "This simply isn't you! What in the world is this all about? Is it too much to hope for that you have some kind of explanation, some kind of rationale for—after nine years—suddenly,_ this_?"

"Yes," he said. "It isn't a good one. You won't understand it. You won't agree with it. I barely understand it myself now."

As he gathered his courage and his wits, she blew her nose. "I'm waiting, Joe."

"All right, but first allow me to put this into perspective—"

"_Perspective?_" she all but spat.

"Perspective. Yes. These are the facts you need to know before we begin: My true name, my birth name, is Norton Charpentier. I was born in Elkton, Maryland, on November nineteenth, 1960. Yes, I'm a U.S. citizen by birth, and I'll turn fifty this autumn. I spent only ten months in British Columbia, working on my identity. Before I was Joe McAfee I was an accountant. I had a wife and a daughter. All the basic framework of what you've known about me is a lie."

Most of that was also news to Ted, so he looked at both of the Hawthornes. "So with that as my background, are you ready for me to go on?"

Ted said nothing. Bren wiped her eyes one last time and squared her shoulders. "Let's hear it, whoever you are."

"Why did you pick the name Joe McAfee?" Ted asked, his brow furrowed.

Charpentier had to laugh. "I took the identity of a man named Bruno McAfee—and I didn't like the name 'Bruno.' But 'Norton' and 'McAfee' are both computer utilities, so I took Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters, as my first name. It may sound silly, but that helped me to learn to think of myself as this—other entity."

"Cut to the chase," Bren snapped. "What on earth did Agent Hotchner do to you—"

"I thought I was going to tell you about it—"

"You're not telling it fast enough. High points. PowerPoint presentation. Quick summary, please," Bren insisted. "I promise I'll sit still for the unabridged version once I have the facts."

Norton just stared at her. "I'll bet you were a bitch in the classroom."

"On wheels," she enunciated crisply.

"Fine. The essentials: When Aaron Hotchner was a young prosecutor, he withheld evidence that would have cleared me of some ugly charges. As a result, I spent five years in prison among people who thought I was a child molester. While I was in prison, my wife and daughter died.

"Once I won my appeal, once the state had tried to pay me off for malicious prosecution—as if money makes a difference—I lived to punish the man who'd destroyed my life. I faked my own death, I've lived every hour of every day as Joe McAfee—I _like_ being Joe McAfee; the only parts of being Nortie Charpentier I liked died with my Diana and Ellie. This spring I finally managed to capture the man who took everything I ever valued away from me. It was the most ghastly mistake imaginable. I ruined my new life all by myself, no help from anyone else, and now I've ruined Aaron's, too. I managed to get him out of there before everything collapsed, which is the only bright spot in an otherwise utterly, utterly joyless story."

He glared at Bren Hawthorne.

"The. End," he snapped.


	47. Viewed as by Lightning

A/N: Galloping toward the climax, but still a few surprises in store for you and for our favorite agents! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much! We cannot express adequately how tickled we are when people have read our story carefully enough that they've picked up the clues about what would happen next. We're delighted and honored and thrilled by your kindness and enthusiasm!

_Ma non per dirvi come pria:  
>«Le lacrime che noi versiam son false!<br>Degli spasimi e de' nostri martir  
>non allarmatevi!» No! No:<br>L'autore ha cercato invece pingervi  
>uno squarcio di vita. <em>

Prologue_, I Pagliacci_ (The Clowns) by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, 1892

[Loosely: "But we're not here to tell you, 'These tears are just for show! Don't let our pain and suffering alarm you!' Not at all! The author intends to show you a slice of life."]

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-Seven**

**Viewed as by Lightning**

The best thing to happen so far this evening was that someone came in and unhooked him from that goddamn IV line. She removed the needle in the back of his right hand, dressed the site, then installed a fresh port just above the thumb joint, taping it down securely.

"We'll have to flush it periodically," she assured him, "but unless something comes up and you have to have an IV again, you'll have more freedom of movement."

"That's great," he said. "And when do I get clothes? When do I go home?"

She smiled—she had dimples—and said, "That's up to your doctors. As to clothes, check with your doctor; maybe he'll have no problem with you wearing civvies."

No longer tethered to the intravenous line, he immediately limped to the high-backed plastic armchair beside the window, threw a sheet across the seat, and settled in to watch the world go by. For the first time truly alone, since Morgan and Rossi had disappeared back down the hall, he addressed himself once more to the puzzle of piecing together the last few days.

The hard part was that his surroundings were just one big throbbing distraction. He'd been deprived of ambient sounds and smells, of sights and sensations, for only four months, yet he was experiencing some difficulty readjusting to life going on around him. He followed every movement, jumped a little at every unidentified sound, like, like—well, like an abused child, defensive and hypervigilant.

Allegedly, that was part of the reason why they had yet to bring him his cell phone or laptop; because they didn't want him even further distracted while he was still processing the basics. They'd seemed pleased that he wasn't watching the TV. Actually, he'd turned it on once when JJ stepped out to call Will, thumbing idly past the hospital's general announcements channel and its instructional channel—feature of the evening: _Adrenaline and You_—and had found himself fastening on the efforts of a pair of snarky fashion experts to show some poor hapless woman why her wardrobe pretty much sucked. After several minutes of wondering why this was necessary and why there was actual television about it—and inevitably, why the hell was he watching it?—he'd turned off the set and kept it off.

He gazed down at the tiny, small-town-Thursday-night corner of the world that was available for his viewing pleasure, and tried to relax.

**~ o ~**

_His first thought was "fish food," partially because in the distance the vision he saw seemed the shape and color of the flakes he'd scattered on the surface of his great-aunt's aquarium as a child. The fact that he was crawling through almost a foot of swiftly moving water helped him to make the connection, too. He'd been pretty sure it was just another mirage, another artifact of an exhausted, desperate brain, but then Warden had seen it too._

_They were played out after hours of feeling their way through complete darkness, barely moving one hand, one knee, in front of the other. Warden'd been wheezing audibly for the last hour or so, and neither of them had either the breath or the presence of mind to do much talking. They'd agreed that as long as they moved against the current, they were probably heading toward the outside, and so they kept up the weary crawl. _

_But Warden also saw the fish flake seemingly hanging in mid-air, which meant that it was an opening to the outside. They scrambled frantically toward it, and—life imitating nightmare—it seemed as though they crawled and crawled and got no further. Then—again as in a dream—suddenly there it was, shaped more like a mutant comma than anything else, two feet across at its widest. They climbed out, then up a bank, then lay there on their sides in the weeds between a stream and a mud cliff, gasping, laughing, and weeping, neither of them completely sure they'd really made it._

_A cold drizzle ran down their necks and kept their clothing saturated. A feeble excuse for a setting sun shone gray and defeated through the black clouds to the west, but for Hotchner and Charpentier, it might as well have been midday. Then Aaron lost his footing (kneeing, actually, since neither of them had the muscle strength to stand up yet) and started to slide down the hill. He drilled his fingers into the mud as deep as he could, but the only result was that he was dragging big handfuls of mud down with him._

_Norton wrapped his hands around Aaron's wrists. His precise little hands were capable of an extraordinary vise-grip. He wrapped his legs awkwardly around a sapling and stretched out to his full five-eight and held on firmly as Aaron all but swam back up the decline. "Come on, Hotchner," he kept urging. "Please, come on! You can do it!" And when he finally got Aaron back, shaking at least as much with exhaustion as with cold, he wrapped his arms around him and sobbed with relief._

_Then maybe half an hour later, as the storm around them kicked it back into deluge mode, Norton turned, reaching for the last bit of rope they had, and slipped, but the decline was far steeper, not so much a slide as a real fall. With his last words of encouragement for Aaron to find the road, he fell something like thirty feet._

_It was too dark to see, but when the lightning flashed, Aaron saw Charpentier lying on his back among the rocks, mouth open, one leg bent at an unnatural angle. He told himself that Warden would get up, that he would start moving, but each time the lightning flared, the body at the bottom of the cliff was in the same position._

"_Up and to my right," he whispered into the storm eventually, and began to climb._

**~ o ~**

The name of the place was the Downtown Diner—a bit of a stretch in a burg with one traffic light and maybe a dozen stop signs—but the food was good, the service was excellent, and it stayed open until ten. Better still, it was a half-block walk from the hospital.

JJ settled into a booth across from Morgan and next to Rossi. "Who's with him now?"

"Nobody," Rossi replied with a sour expression. "He's had a bellyful of us, so we decided to give him a little space. It was that, or push harder than we're supposed to be pushing now."

"You interviewed him?"

"Briefly," Morgan said, without enthusiasm.

"So bring me up to date," she said. "Don't leave me hanging."

Morgan shook his head and Rossi moodily traced circles in the condensation on the outside of his water glass.

"What?" she said. "He's having nightmares again? He's losing it? What's going on?"

"He's holding back," Derek said. "Not just _not remembering_. Actively _holding things back_, as if he hasn't decided how much he can trust us with. _Us!_"

"He gave us things to work with," Dave added. "Some consciously, some—I think he didn't realize he was giving us new information—but there's a sense of caution. Insecurity. And, I think, a little anger's about ready to start coming out."

"Sure," JJ said, "and he's spent the last four months surviving by placing all his trust in this Warden asshole, so that anger's gonna be directed at us first—"

"Which is a good thing," Morgan reminded her, and probably himself, "because it means that part of him already knows he can afford to get pissed at us, because we won't stop caring about him just because he snarls at us. Hell, in some ways, snarling's _normal_ for Hotch."

He grinned. His heart wasn't entirely in it, Jennifer knew, but it was a brave try. Everyone, on some level, had entertained the secret fantasy that Aaron Hotchner had battled his way out of his captivity and was pumped and motivated and confident. Was ready to pick up pretty much where he'd left off, ready to resume his leadership position and move on. This fragile, tremulous man with haunted eyes and unsteady fingers was new to them.

"Stockholm?" she suggested.

"Possible," said Rossi. "He definitely has an investment in Warden, he even called him 'my Warden' at least once, very—very possessively, but there isn't much of the usual defense, the usual _oh, it was all my fault_ stuff."

"We got _that_ on the videos," she said.

"We got it today, too," Morgan said. "He says that Warden's an avenger-type UNSUB, that he tracks down prosecutorial injustices—and that he'd identified his, meaning Hotch's."

"You're kidding," JJ said. "Hotch is claiming to have made a prosecutorial error that caused someone to be wrongfully convicted?"

Morgan scowled. "He didn't give any details, but it sure sounds that way. And it fits with the so-called 'statements' he had to make, the things he recited in the first video."

"We got other stuff, too," Rossi continued. "Stuff we have to follow up on. Like, he knew that the big cage area was to be called Andersonville II, so he's had contact with at least one of the former members of Shield of Yahweh, although he claimed he'd never heard of the group before."

"Didn't claim," Morgan said. "Implied. All wide-eyed, 'Oh, is that the name of the group?' He was good, though. Almost convincing."

"He thinks Fuzz Face and Warden may be two different people," said Rossi, "but he isn't sure of it. I want to show him the security videos, but we're gonna do everything in good order and get Wu to sign off on it before we show it to him."

"And Warden's into astrology," said Morgan. "Hotch said that Warden had something, it turns out to be a big bunch of planets, in Capricorn, which Hotch said was supposed to describe Warden perfectly. And he said he had one himself in Sagittarius, which Warden—not Hotch—said describes Hotch perfectly. Kevin did some research on that, and he said that Hotchner only has this 'major stellium' thing significantly if you count asteroids and something—" He consulted his phone. "TNPs. Anyhow, it's way beyond reading your horoscope in the paper, or even getting a computer chart done for you."

Continuing to look at something—probably email—on his phone, he said, "Capricorn implies that whatever Warden _really_ is, he perceives himself as persistent, hard-working, a planner, dependable, organized, stubborn, demanding, and unforgiving."

"Some of which actually fits Hotch, too," said Rossi. "He's being completely unforgiving of himself, of his fear, ashamed that he tried to bargain with the guy, and he's completely sucked into this idea that he's made major prosecutorial mistakes."

When the server came over with her to-go order, Jennifer gave the other two profilers a sympathetic smile. "Well, I'll keep the pressure off him," she said. "I'll nice him silly. But if I see a way to throw him a curve, may I?"

"I trust your judgment, sweetheart," Rossi said gently. And considering his reputation as a Lothario, it was odd that from him, _sweetheart_ had neither a condescending nor a sexually harassing sense to it. "I always have."

**~ o ~**

On the seventh floor of Nittany St. Luke's, Brenda Hawthorne kept her eyes riveted to the heavily bandaged man in the bed, the man whose usual confident voice had become a weary rasp. The man with two black eyes, five broken ribs, and a shattered left leg. The man who, up until twenty minutes ago, she'd known as Joseph McAfee.

"Took us almost twenty-one hours," he said finally. He spoke slowly, clearly affected by both his injuries and the drugs he was taking—but, being Joey, or whoever he was, he expressed himself carefully and in complete sentences. "I'd lost the maps, but it didn't matter, because by then we'd lost all three flashlights. We'd rest when we could, huddling together, trying to hang on to any body heat we could. You know me, I'm not a touchy-feely person. Neither is Aaron—is Agent Hotchner. Got to tell you, though, those few times we managed to find some ledge that was completely out of the water and huddle together for a while, I don't think we'd have made it otherwise.

"But there we were, out at last. It wasn't an opening I knew about—it was, ah, just west of the Williamses' property line. The—what's the creek that runs along there? Montana Creek, I think—anyway, Montana Creek had overflowed its banks and part of it was running straight down into the mine. To orient you, you know that stand of American Reds that turns colors so early every year? Near the Deazells'? The overlook there, just above the maples? Well, that's where we came out. For a while, it was something out of 'Invictus,' 'bloodied but unbowed.' We just lay there and tried to remember how to breathe. Then we started moving along the ridge line. Where the cliff's fairly vertical, just above the gravel Darlington Road turnaround, that's where I fell. I remember thinking I'd broken my back, then everything went black."

McAfee-or-Charpentier shifted positions. "I don't know how long I was out, but when I came around, the lightning had moved way to the east, so something like fifteen, twenty minutes elapsed. I called up for Hotchner, but he didn't respond. I didn't know whether he'd fallen asleep or kept moving.

"That's when I realized that I wasn't more than half a mile from where I'd parked the car—the lot of Skippy's Beer Stop. And it doesn't seem like much distance, but when you're dragging yourself along the ground with a busted leg, it takes an eternity. I know I've got no business making myself the victim here, but that half-mile is probably the hardest thing I've done in years. When you're crawling on your belly, every rock, every bush is an obstacle. It took me almost three hours. I crapped out a couple times, just passed out where I was."

If it had been anyone else but Joe McAfee, well, the former Joe McAfee, she'd have asked him how he found his way from the turnaround to Skippy's, since there was only one light along that stretch of road. But this was Joe, this was the man who'd spent hours upon hours, on foot and on horseback, prowling the hills and the woods. If anyone could do it, it was Sarge.

"The lightning helped," he continued. "And I—this'll sound stupid, I slid my jacket under my left leg so I could kind of drag it along. It still hurt like hell, but it hurt less than if I'd been trying to use those muscles. I kept praying for some car to come around the bend—I had a fantasy it'd be you guys—but everybody was staying in, I guess.

"By the time I got to the car, it was past midnight. Skippy's was closed and mine was the only car in the lot. I'd been thinking, well, I'll get help, but there I was, still on my own. But I managed to climb into the car, I was out of the weather, and now I had my cell phone. And, thank God, there's good reception out by Skippy's."

Bren narrowed her eyes at—whoever this man was. "You couldn't have used your phone when you came out of the mine?"

"I didn't take it with me," he said. "There's no reception down there, and I expected that we'd be coming out the, uh, the cave entrance by Nobles' Knob and just follow the road back to Skippy's. I figured wrong, obviously. So—anyhow, there I was at Skippy's.

"That's when—" He was seized by a fit of coughing that left his face contorted and his voice a high-pitched squeak of misery. He took a few sips of water and closed his eyes, then tried again. "That's when I called your husband, Bren."

_Yes, and thanks a bunch for that._

"I'd given him an envelope a while back, with 'To Be Opened in Case of My Death' written on it; told him to hide it where no one else would find it. It was my insurance, so if I dropped dead, he—Hotchner—wouldn't starve to death down there. I wrote a simplified explanation, gave my true name, and listed the two emergency numbers I got from Hotchner's wallet when I—when he first arrived."

"When you _kidnapped _him," Bren corrected. "Don't give me this namby-pamby 'arrived' BS, Joe. You know better than that."

He sighed deeply. "You're right. I kidnapped him. And I asked Ted to get the letter—"

"—which I'd hidden in the lining of the trunk—" Ted added.

"—and told him that the man was somewhere on the north side of the mountain, wearing purple hospital scrubs. That he had to be found, he had to be taken to safety. I told him I knew I'd be arrested, that I had no interest in evading responsibility for my actions, but I was in no physical condition to go looking for him myself."

"I chose the second number you listed," Ted said. "In the middle of it was five-nine-two-six, digits five through eight of _pi_, so it was easier to remember. I didn't think I'd need it, thought he'd be able to speak for himself, but he was—he was in pretty bad shape by the time we got to him." He turned to Bren and tried to smile at her. "I decided that just taking him in and saying, 'This is the missing FBI agent' was likely to raise more questions than it answered. But if he'd told me the phone number, then—it worked better."

Bren Hawthorne just stared at one of the smartest men she'd ever met. "What in the _hell_ were you _smoking_, Teddy? Was it your turn to wear the Stupid Pants or something?"

Her husband met her gaze squarely. "Believe I'll take a page from Mr. Charpentier's playbook here and just say 'yes.' How's that, honey?"

She shook her head slowly. "So—you didn't get involved in this—this mess until Wednesday morning?"

"That would be right," Ted replied. "Until Sarge—until—this is gonna take some getting used to, Joey—until he called when we were packing up the food and asked me to go get the envelope, I didn't know anything about anything."

"Whatever it takes to protect Ted," Charpentier said earnestly, "I'll do it. I never intended to involve either of you in this, but someone had to rescue Hotchner or hypothermia would've gotten him, sure as shit."

"But if you're so willing to be arrested," Bren asked, "why in hell did you drive clear back to State College with your leg bleeding all over the place? And why'd you run into the light pole?"

McAfee-or-Charpentier seemed troubled. "I don't know for sure," he said with a sigh. "I think I had some idea of—oh, putting my affairs in order, being organized about the whole mess. I don't remember the accident at all, but I'm told I probably passed out from blood loss. I don't even remember most of the drive home." He coughed again and grimaced. "Not the best plan I've ever made."

**~ o ~**

When she got to the fourth floor, the door to Hotch's room was closed. Balancing her takeout order on one arm, she knocked.

"Just a few minutes," the unmistakable tones of Aaron Hotchner called. "Thank you."

She carried her food down to the waiting area, but chose a seat where she had a clear view down the hallway. While it was almost certain that Hotch was undergoing some physical exam that required a degree of privacy, you just never knew.

She played back his voice in her head, looking for tension, for signals that everything was not as it seemed. After all, while Warden was dead, waiting to wash up if and when the excavators got to that section of the mudslide, Warden's co-conspirators, if any, might well still be out there—and motivated to silence their victim permanently.

No, no matter how carefully she analyzed it, it had sounded like—well, like normal Hotch, on-top-of-his-game, in-control Hotch, right down to the crisp thanks at the end.

Eleven long minutes later, a large man emerged from room 430. Over six feet and bulky, with thick and untidy dark hair, he wore dress slacks and a carelessly tucked dress shirt with rolled sleeves. He wore no tie, but a hospital ID tag dangled from his shirt pocket. He waved at JJ uncertainly, as if Aaron had given him a description and he was wondering whether he was waving at the right person.

_Didn't he say something to Rossi about how Warden might have been heavy-set?_

She bounced to her feet as swiftly as a cardboard tray of takeout would allow her and jogged down the hall, hoping to connect with Hotch's visitor before he got into the elevator. She timed it well; the doors were just sliding open when she got even with him.

"Hi," she said, big smile on her face. "How's he doing?"

The man had coarse features, a unibrow, and a five o'clock shadow to rival Hotch's. He studied her with cool interest. "Ask him," he said.

His name tag said M. I. Pearson. It identified him as a staff member at St. Vincent's Altoona, the main hospital for this local campus. He nodded brusquely at her and entered the elevator.

She yanked out her cell—screw hospital regs—and speed-dialed Morgan. Hurriedly she gave a description of the man she'd seen, then said, "I'm going to check on Hotch; you check this Pearson guy out."

Then she continued to the room, her heart pounding, fearing God only knew what.

The door to 430 was open, but the lights were off and the privacy curtain was drawn so the bed nearer the window wasn't visible from outside the room. Her heart in her mouth, JJ called, "Hotch?" and hurried to move the curtain. As she did so, a familiar voice said, "Jayje?" He sounded weak and subdued, but not in distress.

She shoved the curtain out of the way. Aaron, who was seated in a chair beside the window with the sheet wrapped around his lower body, said, "Roll that back, please. It blocks the reflection from the lights in the hall."

"Well, look at you!" she burst out, delighted. "Sitting up, where's your IV? You've been busted loose? Way to go!"

"Thanks." He looked, if anything, more exhausted and withdrawn than he had the day before. She wondered whether he was missing his family.

"I brought you a shake," she said. "Well, one for each of us. Which one do you want: vanilla, or strawberry?"

"A milk shake? Vanilla, please. That was sweet of you," he said, accepting the oversized cup and the straw. "And you can try some of the coffee cake that the Hawthornes brought me." He was trying to be friendly, to be gracious, but it was obviously an effort.

"I think I'll pass on that for now. Shall I turn on a light?"

There was a hesitation, then he said, "I'd rather not, if you don't mind."

She looked down on the small-town lights below. "Still enjoying watching the world go by?"

"Yes." His voice remained muffled, subdued. "Mm, this is good," he said. "Thank you." He sighed deeply. "Everything about life—it's like I'm experiencing it all over again."

"It'll be nice to see Jess and Jack again in the morning," she said. "I hear that Sean's coming in, too."

"He is."

She pulled another chair over and sat directly across from him. There was just enough light coming in from Union Avenue for her to see that his eyes were red-rimmed. His hands, loose on his lap, trembled perceptibly. "Is everything OK, Hotch?"

He nodded. "Just fine," he whispered.

"You're not fooling me, you know."

"Processing," he said, his voice weary. "A lot of processing going on. Give me time."

She leaned forward. "Want to talk?"

He leaned back and turned toward the window. "No." Then, perhaps deciding that he'd been too dismissive, he said, "Not now. Thanks for offering. Actually, I'd rather be alone, if you don't mind."

Her phone vibrated. She slipped it out of her pocket far enough to see the text from Morgan, _"McKinley Pearson is psychotherapist, specialty in trauma."_

She withdrew to a distant chair and opened up her iPad. "I'm not going to leave," she said, as gently as she could, "but I'll give you your space."

_At least he's getting help. He's talking to someone._


	48. Strangeness in the Night

A/N: Galloping toward the climax, but there are still a few surprises in store for you and for our favorite agents! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much! We cannot express adequately how tickled we are when people have read our story carefully enough that they've picked up the clues about what would happen next. We're delighted and honored and thrilled by your kindness and enthusiasm!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-Eight**

**Strangeness in the Night**

_Her great-grandfather sat in a care chair at the nursing home, wearing his nightshirt and robe and a pair of scuffed leather slippers. With his bare, pale, scrawny legs crossed and his arms doubled over his abdomen, he'd stare silently out at the cars in the parking lot. His room smelled funny and her father was always quiet and sad after they went to see Gramps Wyler._

_Aaron Hotchner sat in a care chair in the center of his cell in a nightshirt and robe and a pair of scuffed leather slippers. Jennifer's parents had managed to evacuate her Grandma Jareau and Grandpa Muehler, but Hotch just sat there, staring out at the sun glinting off the roofs of the cars in the parking lot…. _

"JJ," a familiar voice said. "Agent Jareau?"

Her eyes opened and the angle was wrong, all wrong, and _Jesus H. Christ, how'd that happen? _She was sitting on the edge of Hotch's hospital bed and she'd fallen over sideways into the pillows and had—fallen asleep.

_God, can it get more embarrassing?_

"Sorry," she squeaked, sitting up straight, barely preventing her iPad from sliding off her lap. Thank heaven she'd managed to hang on to it! "Oh my God, so sorry—"

"It wasn't more than a few seconds," the familiar velvety baritone rumbled. "I think you were looking for more video from the water park, remember? Then your eyes got distant and you toppled over and—"

"Oh, God." She rubbed her eyes, shook the sleep from her head. "What got into me?"

His face would have been so soothing, so reassuring, with that gentle smile, with those kind, intelligent eyes, if it weren't also as pale as Gramps's shins and marked by cuts and bruises. "Maybe I'm contagious," he said. "But really—you just now dropped off."

_Sitting in a chair by the window. And I turned him into Gramps Wyler. Too creepy!_

_And you're supposed to be guarding him!_

She checked her watch. It was just 9:34; only three minutes ago she'd noticed the time on her iPad. She really had (literally) dropped off to sleep.

Funny how she'd combined childhood memories with—with—_OK, that requires some thought._

She opened her eyes again and Hotch was still looking at her with something that might be sympathy or might be amusement.

_Sitting in the center of the cell._

She set her computer aside. "May I ask you just one question about your time with Warden?" she asked, trying to keep her voice gentle.

Maybe because of the vanilla shake, after a long searching look, he said, "Sure." No energy to it, though.

"If this guy was mostly working alone, which is what you told Morgan and Rossi, how did he get in and out of your cell without you overpowering him? Because I'm having trouble trying to work out how one guy managed to keep you under control. You're way tougher than you look, Hotch," she added, hoping to appeal to his vanity—_he has to have vanity, all guys have vanity._

Neither embarrassment nor pride showed on his features. "There was a window," he said after a moment, his voice barely a whisper. "About fifteen by fifteen." He almost smiled. "Its hypotenuse was about twenty-one inches. How's that for a detail?"

She called up her calculator and punched the numbers in. "Yep, about fifteen inches," she said. "You did math in your cell?"

"You'd be surprised," he replied, his voice still soft. "Anyway, there was a steel rod running vertically down the middle of the window. It was painted red," he added. "Every time Warden wanted to enter the cell, I had to go stand by the window and put my arms through it on either side of the bar, then he'd handcuff me around the bar. No exceptions. He cuffed me before he came in, and he released me once he was out and the door was locked again."

"What, you were attached to the wall standing up? Always?"

"Well, I really wasn't attached to the wall...but yeah."

"Mr. Hotchner?" a nurse with a paper cup and a clipboard said. "I'd like to talk to you for just a minute or two about your medication changes."

He glanced up at her and said, "Certainly. Jayje, would you mind stepping out?"

"Not at all." She picked up her iPad and moved out into the hall. While there, she composed a quick email to the Team about the bar and the handcuffs. They'd all wondered how a lone so-called Warden could move in and out of an eight-by-eight cell with a combat-trained agent in it and not eventually get taken down.

They'd considered profound Stockholm, repeated drugging, threats to friends and family, and kept coming back to—_there has to be more than one of them_. Even someone who—_let's be honest, the kindest thing you can say about Hotchner's hand-to-hand is that he consistently rates better than Spencer Reid_—even someone who's more at home on the firing range than in the gym, especially like Hotchner, who's motivated and fearless, is bound to get lucky eventually.

The window, the rod, the handcuffs—that explained a lot.

"Thank you," the nurse said. "You can go back in now."

Hotchner still sat in the chair, but his reading light was on and the curtain had been moved out of the way.

"Everything OK?" JJ asked.

"Yeah."

She took the chair she'd been sitting in earlier and moved it closer to his. _Might as well tackle this one while I'm at it._ "Did the guys tell you," she said, keeping her voice casual, careless, "that we wound up looking for Fur Face everywhere we went?"

"Fur Face?" Hotchner said. "Same guy as Fuzz Face?"

"Yeah, Fur, Fuzz, it kinda changed from day to day. We never saw anyone with muttonchops like the man in your garage, but Garcia and her facial recognition software found a bunch of people who looked a lot like him without the whiskers."

"A bunch?"

She sighed. "You know the kinks in the system. Someone has really regular features, it's always harder to come up with a match."

Aaron returned to gazing glumly out the window. "So what did the Team decide?"

_Entering dangerous territory here, girl._ She tapped her fingers along the side of her iPad and aimed to keep the same chatty tone going. "We found some pretty dramatic resemblances. On the Fourth of July, we went to the Mall to see Lang Lang and the fireworks—"

At last Hotch seemed to take some interest. "I thought he was dead."

"Lang Lang? No, he was there for the concert, Anderson's fiancee wanted to see him; her sister wants to be a concert pianist—" Her voice trailed off as she realized that Hotch was staring at her in profound confusion. "What?"

Hotch seemed a little embarrassed. "We're not talking about a giant panda here?"

_Don't laugh. Everyone has holes in his knowledge, even Reid. Aaron can't be an expert in everything._ "Um, no. That was Ling Ling. This is Lang Lang. He's a concert pianist."

He smiled faintly. "Oops. Thank you. Continue, sorry for the interruption."

"Anyway," she said, in a way grateful for the momentary misunderstanding; it reduced the tension even more. "Will and Henry and I were there with Derek and Jack and Anderson and Kristi, and one of our Fur Face candidates was there, too, with his girlfriend, so of course Derek had to go strike up a conversation with him while Will and I got pictures."

"Wow," said Hotchner, his smile broadening. "That's—dedication. As it happens, however, I know exactly where Warden was on the Fourth."

"You do?"

"Yeah." He shifted in his chair. "Weekend of the Fourth," he began hesitantly, "I—my anger got the better of me and I said a few things to him—to my Warden—that I regretted later. The whole, the giving my statements on my knees, that was my, ah, consequences. Part of them."

She wasn't sure how to react to that. Her intention had been to show him a face that was close to that of the man in the garage without making him watch the security video, maybe making it all casual and relaxed. She hadn't expected anything like this. Now her face burned with embarrassment for bringing the subject up—and her heart burned with rage at Warden for mistreating a good man, an honorable man.

"You weren't handcuffed to a bar when you gave your statements," she said. "Where was Warden?"

"Looking through the window. He probably had his camera or his cell phone in his hand and I didn't notice it." Hotchner seemed chagrined that he'd failed to spot it.

"Wait, you didn't know he was taping that?"

He shook his head slowly. "Nope. Found out later that he'd taken video and he'd sent it to you—to the Team." He drew a long, shaky breath. "I hoped for a long time that he'd been lying, that he'd never taped it, that you'd never see it." He looked everywhere but at JJ. "But then I realized that he hadn't lied to me yet, even when it was in his best interests to shade the truth. That was hard," he added, almost to himself.

_Too bad Warden's dead. I'd kill him in a heartbeat._

"But I interrupted you," Hotch said, and now he was gazing directly at her. "You were telling me about tracking potential Fuzz Faces, Fur Faces, whatever. On the Mall." He shook his head. "That's above and beyond, Jayje. This was one of the guys Garcia's software identified?"

"Yeah, want to see?"

He shrugged. "Why not?"

She got up. "Do I dare sit on the bed again? You don't want me dozing off again, do you?"

He patted the mattress with his left hand. "You won't," he assured her. "And it was kind of cute."

She resumed her place on the edge of the bed, scrolled through her image files, and found the picture of Fur Face Eight and his girlfriend. "In the red lawn chairs," she said. "The older couple."

Aaron Hotchner studied it solemnly for a long minute. "So the guy in the garage looked kind of like this guy?"

"Almost exactly," she assured him. "It was freaking uncanny."

"He doesn't look particularly threatening."

"He doesn't, does he? His name's Joseph McAfee; he's a transplanted Canadian. He teaches theater arts at Hazelhurst College. We eventually eliminated him because he just flat-out didn't have the _time_ to keep a prisoner—he's a tutor and he trains therapy dogs and horses and he has an active social life and—"

There was a sharp rap on the door jamb, and JJ was surprised at the hopefulness on Hotch's face as he looked up, at the relief as he recognized the man whose ID said _M. I. Pearson_. He was as untidy as he had seemed before. "Aaron?" the man said.

"Mac," Hotchner said, and raised himself carefully out of his chair. "Come on in." He turned to JJ. "Jayje, would you mind? I need some time for myself. Why don't you take an hour or so off? Call Will or play video games or—whatever."

"I'm not supposed to—"

"Agent Jareau," Hotch said patiently, "I promise you, I'll be in no danger for the next hour."

"Perhaps a little longer," the alleged psychotherapist said. "It's our first visit." He nodded to JJ. "I can have someone come get you when we're done," he said. "Just let me know where you're likely to be."

She checked her watch. _A shrink who makes professional visits at 9:53 P.M.?_

**~ o ~**

The double glass doors at the front entrance of St. Vincent's, Central Campus, opened out to a sheltered concrete apron flanked by potted evergreens and stone benches that overlooked a doctors-only parking area. The driveway wound past the front door, through the doctors' lot then continued around into a delivery and short-term visitors' parking area.

Morgan stood with Rossi in the shadows beyond the bench on the left hand side and waited. Finally, shortly after eleven, a tall, thickset and disheveled man stepped out under the decorative overhang and took his keys from his pants pocket.

"Just a moment," Morgan said, his voice low but authoritative. He flashed his creds. "SSA Derek Morgan, FBI. May I see some identification?"

The man looked down at Morgan to his left and Rossi to his right, and said, "Certainly."

"Slowly," Morgan added, as the man reached into his pocket. "No sudden movements."

"While I have only the greatest respect for the Second Amendment," the big man murmured, "I myself own no firearms. Unless you're likely to be threatened by a roll of Tums, you have nothing to fear. Should I have my hands up?" he added. "I mean, the one not reaching slowly into my pocket?"

"Not necessary," Rossi said curtly. "Not at the moment. Just produce your ID and keep your commentary to yourself."

The man chuckled softly and carefully withdrew his wallet, extracting his driver's license and handing it to Morgan.

"_McKinley Irving Pearson_," Morgan read aloud, followed by the man's Altoona address. He studied the photo before passing it to Rossi. Like nearly all official photos, it was unflattering, but was undoubtedly the image of the man standing before them. He was even unshaven and uncombed on his license photo. "Got anything else? Anything that entitles you to be visiting an injured FBI agent under special protection at this hour of the evening?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," the man said evenly as he accepted his driver's license back from Morgan. Delving into his wallet again, he produced a card issued by the American Psychotherapy Association declaring him a diplomate of that organization, as well as a Certified Hospital Specialist. He displayed them to Rossi, then handed them to Morgan along with his hospital credentials, which had still been clipped to his front shirt pocket.

Morgan looked them over, disappointment clearly showing on his face. "They seem to be in order, but let's just go back into the hospital and find someone who can vouch for you."

"You can start with Dr. Wu, the staff neurologist," the supposed Pearson said. "He suggested I let Agent Hotchner know that I was available if he wanted someone to talk to."

"Nice try," Rossi said, keeping his tone civil and professional. "I suppose you'd know all about whether Agent Hotchner has any interest in talking to psychotherapists. Come on, let's go back inside."

"Suit yourself," the man said, his own affect cool and confident.

_Don't pull that shit with me_, Morgan thought grimly. In his capacity as acting Unit Chief, he'd tried twice already to get Hotch set up with counseling services, first with a Bureau shrink, then with a local therapist that Erin Strauss had made arrangements for. Hotchner'd refused them both, had just shut them down without further discussion.

The three men entered the quiet lobby of St. Vee Cent, and Morgan realized he had no firm idea of where to go first. There was nobody at the visitors' desk and the gift shop was closed. Finally he fastened on the hallway that led back to the emergency rooms.

"There's an on-duty administrator on the second floor," Pearson said. "I believe it's Geri Kahn tonight, although I may be wrong. Go left when you get off the elevator, take the first right and it's the second office along. Her door's generally open."

_Shit, this guy is way too confident_. Determined not to meekly follow Pearson's directions, he left the man momentarily with Rossi while he went in search of someone, anyone wearing a hospital ID. Following the hallway to the end, he saw a sign with an arrow pointing to the right with the word EMERGENCY above it. A few moments later, he entered a smaller lobby, and a man on duty at the desk glanced up expectantly.

"May I help you, sir?"

Derek went over to him, handed him his creds, and said, "Yes, I'm Agent Derek Morgan, FBI. I need someone who can verify a person's employment status here."

The man's eyes widened, then, shaking his head, he handed back Morgan's credentials. "I'm sorry, Agent. I wouldn't have that authority. You might want to talk to the administrator on duty. Ms. Kahn is our night administrator; you can find her on the second floor."

Deflated, Morgan nodded and mumbled, "Thanks. I'll do that."

Back with Rossi and Pearson, he said, "All right, we'll go see Ms. Kahn. If she clears you, you're free to go."

Once back in the lobby, the three men boarded the elevator and rode up to the second floor. The layout was just as Pearson had described. Luckily, they found Ms. Kahn in her office. The petite brunette was typing at a ferocious speed, all the while scowling at her computer monitor. Piles of file folders, bristling with color-coded stickers, were neatly stacked on her desk.

Since the door was already open, Morgan knocked softly on the door jamb. Ms. Kahn looked up, somewhat startled, apparently unused to having multiple visitors at that time of the evening.

Pushing her reading glasses on top of her head, she said, "Hello? What can I do for you?"

Rossi herded Pearson forward until he was standing just inside her office. "Ma'am, we're Agents Rossi and Morgan with the FBI," he told her, exhibiting his creds while Morgan did the same.

"Hold on a moment," she said. "Let me see those before you go any further."

After studying the two sets of creds for a few moments, she handed them back and said, "All right. What can I do for you? And why do you have Dr. Pearson here with you?"

"You know this man, then?" Rossi asked her. "You can verify his identity and that he works here?"

Kahn smiled. "Of course. Mac's had privileges here for many years; he's been around longer than I have. May I ask why you're interested in him?"

Morgan gave her his most winning smile. "I'm sure you're aware a fellow agent has been admitted to the hospital. We just want to verify that anyone coming into contact with him has a proper right to do so."

"Well, I can indeed verify that Dr. Pearson has that right. Either he or someone else from his practice routinely visits trauma victims and explains what services the hospital offers that might benefit them."

"Thank you, ma'am. That's all we needed to know," Morgan said.

As the three exited the office, Pearson turned to the two agents, still cool and unruffled. "And now, if you have nothing further, am I excused? I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow."

_Sonofabitch couldn't even work up the passion to be smug._

Morgan looked at Rossi, who shrugged. "Fine," he said at last. "Sorry to have detained you, but you understand we have to be thorough."

Without a word, Pearson turned on his heel and headed for the stairs.

**~ o ~**

He braced his hands against the wall of the shower, gritting his teeth as something that approached ecstasy ripped through him. A night almost dream-free, hot water thundering down on his aching back and shoulders, a hot shower, something he'd actually wept for, prayed for, in his months as Prisoner. On his bed, a brown paper bag with underwear, jeans, shoes. Shoes, holy Christ, _shoes_! Tears streamed down his face and all the assorted pains left over from his escape diminished to insignificance. Even that pesky throbbing left knee meant nothing here in this white porcelain temple of heat and sweet fragrances.

_My friends. My family. Jack, so sweet, so smart, so forgiving of my absence._

Tears of gratitude flowed anew even as he shut off the water, even as he made himself stand erect—most of his weight on his right leg—and enjoy the sensation as steam dissipated and cool air brushed his skin. Cool but not cold, nothing like the eternal refrigerator that had been his cell.

Clinging to the metal rails, he climbed out of the tub and stood in the center of the room, avoiding the mirrors and reflective surfaces. He dried himself slowly, thoroughly, examining each bruise for signs of healing. _I'm really here. There's not a dream on earth that lasts three days. Swelling doesn't go down, lacerations don't scab over in dreams. In dreams, when you have to pee, it doesn't matter how often you dream you're taking a piss, you still have to go. _

Once he was dry, brushed and shaved and wrapped in a single cotton hospital gown, he grasped the metal cane with its foam hand grip and limped from the bathroom, checking to make sure the door to the hall was still shut, and drew the curtains around his bed.

Underwear. _Who'd ever consider old cotton boxers a luxury item?_ He pulled a plain white cotton tee over his head and let it slide down over his shoulders and chest, biting his lip to keep from breaking down all over again over the simple joys of normality. The jeans were loose and baggy, mute evidence of his weight loss during his captivity, but he tightened the belt an extra notch. _Screw it. It'll come back._

When the knock came at the door, he'd pushed back the privacy drape and he was sitting on the bed, bent over to tie his left sneaker. "A package for you," a female voice announced.

For the first time he took a careful look around his room. It was full of crap, of planters, of flowers, Mylar balloons and stuffed animals. He'd been consciously ignoring them, unable to process their meaning. Now, for the first time, he looked at them seriously.

_How will I get all this crap out of here?_

"Come on in," he said.

An elderly woman with a towering blue-gray beehive and wearing the pastel smock of the hospital's volunteer staff, came in with a small plastic bag folded over on itself so it was about the size of a cell phone. "A woman dropped this off," she said, "a Mrs. Hawthorne?"

Mrs. Hawthorne. Whose husband says I gave him Morgan's cell number. Who bakes the exact same homemade blueberry coffee cake that Warden would bring me.

He thanked the volunteer and set the little package—whatever was in there was solid—over to his side. The woman closed the door behind her, affording him privacy.

Hands trembling, he fumbled the object out of its plastic Giant Eagle bag: an inexpensive MP3 player and earbuds. There was a note attached. In the oddly-angled penmanship of the elderly, the note said, _"A friend of ours says that music always helps a body repair more quickly. We think he speaks truly. Get well soon, Agent Hotchner. Sincerely, Bren and Ted." _He flicked the player on and thumbed through the playlist with growing delight, and only part of it was finding old favorites. Another part was finding new ones, some of the weird covers that Warden had accumulated (Guns 'n' Roses doing "Cat's in the Cradle"; No Doubt's cover of "Ob La Di." Suzi Quatro's "Hit the Road, Jack." Joan Jett's "Summertime Blues." _Ohhh, yessss!_).

And yet, the best part of it was Ms.—no, _Dr._—Hawthorne's choice of verbs. '_Says.' 'Speaks.'_ _Present tense._

"Breakfast cart!" a voice called.

"Come in," he said. He beamed at the dietary aide who presented him with his pancakes and sausage, his toast and juice and scrambled eggs, the sliced fresh honeydew intended to fatten him up—_so maybe the jeans'll fit again_. "It looks great," he assured her as she lifted the metal plate covers.

_'Says.' 'Speaks.'_

_He's alive! Thank you, God, he's alive._


	49. Bringing It

A/N: It looks as if we're maybe 3-5 chapters from the end here, but there are still a few surprises in store for you and for our favorite agents! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world.

Those of you who keep hanging on, reviewing and encouraging us, thank you so very much! We cannot express adequately how tickled we are when people have read our story carefully enough that they've picked up the clues about what would happen next. We're delighted and honored and thrilled by your kindness and enthusiasm!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Forty-Nine**

**Bringing It**

For an instant, it was as though the intervening months had vanished. Aaron Hotchner, fully dressed in jeans and a red knit golf shirt, sat in his chair by the window. When he looked up at them, at Rossi—who'd charmed the night staff into letting him spend a few hours dozing in Aaron's extra bed—and Reid, freshly arrived from the motel in Altoona, comprehension shone on his pale face. He nodded curtly at them, all business, removed a pair of earbuds, and said, "How's it going?"

It was an empty question, a place holder. Everything had changed. Nobody'd discussed it, but everyone sensed it.

"Not bad," Rossi said, just as meaninglessly. "Jack and Jessica'll be here around ten. We're set up in an office in the north wing. Care to come on down and talk with us for a while?"

And there it was, phrased casually, but as obvious as a cold front bumping up against the Alleghenies and settling in to rain forever. _You're officially being interviewed like a suspect._

"Sure," Aaron said, just as casually, his message equally obvious: _Bring it._

They had to slow their pace a little to compensate for Aaron, who walked slowly, his jaw set in that pig-stubborn Hotchner attitude. He'd rejected the nursing staff's offer of a wheelchair, but it was obvious that even with the cane he was walking worse in the shoes than he'd been in hospital footies. Rossi was willing to bet that Hotch's feet were bruised and swollen but he'd accepted the pain as a fair tradeoff for the illusion of normality that wearing shoes gave him.

_He lies to himself far more persuasively than he lies to us._

But in a sense this was good, this return of the pig-stubborn, show-'em-no-weakness Aaron Hotchner. It was certainly an improvement over fragile-and-confused. As to the lying, in spite of his reputation as stoic, tough, honest and upright, Hotch was an accomplished liar. He could spin misdirection when it suited his purposes, to perp and teammate, to spouse and superior, alike. That his purposes almost always involved protecting the Team and snagging UNSUBS didn't make it any less lying. He was hard to catch at it, too, although everyone on the Team knew at least a couple of his tells.

David Rossi was pretty confident that he knew most of them.

The office that the BAU had been offered was used by nursing externs for on-site class work, but the new bunch wouldn't begin their service until October. It was a plain room, brightly lit but sparsely furnished with a long table and six office chairs. A single window looked out over a bleak interior quadrangle made up of two hulking maintenance outbuildings, a few planters, some picnic tables, an inexpensive swing set, and a sheltered smokers' gulag.

"Hey, guys," Penelope Garcia said to them as they arrived, but her eyes were on Hotchner. A symphony of lilac and sunshine yellow today, she was using her own hub rather than either of the hospital's two wi-fi channels. "I'm all fired up and ready. Boss Man, it's great to see you up and dressed!"

"Good to see you again, Miz Nell," Aaron replied as he took a seat. Garcia beamed up at him as though they were sharing a secret joke. Then he folded his hands in front of him and gave Rossi and Reid a cool, speculative glance.

_At what point did we become adversaries, Aaron?_

Rossi got right to it. "This conversation is not being recorded. I understand you're no longer insisting on being released from the hospital today."

Aaron nodded. "After I spoke to Dr. Wu and Dr. Marx, I understood why they wanted to keep an eye on my reactions to the meds for a little longer. Sunday afternoon, Monday morning, I can live with that."

"I understand that you're seeing Dr. Pearson, too."

That mulish Hotchner jaw made a brief reappearance. "I am."

"And yet you declined to meet with Dr. Forbes or Ms. Michalak."

"I did." All grim monosyllables.

"Pearson was—_preferable_—to the Bureau's trauma expert and the counselor from the New York field office?"

"He _is_."

"Would you care to elaborate on that, Aaron?"

"I don't believe that my health care decisions are relevant concerns of the BAU, Dave." Softly phrased, with _I don't believe_, so not directly defiant. But the edge was there.

_Switch gears. Give him something he'll like even less._

"You described Warden as an avenger-type UNSUB." Aaron neither confirmed nor denied it; in thoroughly professional mode, he was unlikely to respond to anything that wasn't a direct question. "You claimed that he collected prosecutorial injustices, and that, I believe your precise words were, 'he had me nailed for mine.' Correct?"

"That's accurate," Hotchner replied, but there was no defensiveness in his tone.

_He's more comfortable talking about his captivity and his potential guilt than he is in talking about his choice of therapists?_ Rossi masked his confusion and pressed on. Reid was sitting completely silent, concentrating on word choices and body language.

"You're admitting to prosecutorial misconduct?"

"I am."

Rossi fought the impulse to tense up. "Please describe it."

At last there was a significant pause. "By doing so," Aaron said calmly, "it's possible that I'll disqualify myself from further service with the Bureau. Would you like me to proceed?"

Rossi and Reid exchanged looks of concern. While he was ninety-five percent sure that any prosecutorial misstep Aaron Hotchner'd ever made had been minor and inadvertent, he didn't want to open any can of worms. Aaron didn't need anything that might come back to bite him later on.

"You described Warden as smart, organized, thorough, and, ah, a Capricorn."

"No, sir," Hotchner said smoothly. "I said he had a major stellium in Capricorn. Warden's sun sign is Scorpio. He talked sometimes about how pointless sun signs were in understanding people, how if you didn't factor in at the very least, the moon, Chiron, and the ascendant, he and I would seem to have a lot in common."

"_Seem_ to have?" Rossi asked. "Can you elaborate?"

"No, Warden didn't tell me that."

Dave detected no sign of deception. Despite this last response from Aaron, he was surprised his old friend had been this forthcoming so far without having to be prompted. _Maybe this won't be as adversarial as I'd feared._ Garcia gave him a subtle sign, so he pressed on into this territory he felt uncomfortable exploring. "All right, then," he said, "do you recall where Warden's, ah, moon, Chiron, and ascendant are?"

"His, ah, ascendant is Gemini, moon is—Sagittarius, I think. Chiron's in Aquarius."

"I don't suppose you know where yours are located?"

"Yes, he told me. Drew a chart for me, actually. Moon in Aquarius, Capricorn ascendant, and Chiron in Pisces."

"So your ascendant is on his stellium, your moon is on his Chiron, and his moon's on your major stellium," Penelope Garcia blurted, tapping away at her laptop. "In addition to your sharing a sun sign."

"Not precisely, mathematically, but—yes, that's close," Hotch confirmed. "I can't sign off on that interpretation—I'm sorry, it's all still bullshit to me—but it definitely had significance to Warden."

Rossi's phone vibrated. He glanced at the text message from Garcia: _Only potential UNSUB on our shortlist who is Scorpio has moon in Cancer._

"How about Chiron and the ascendant?" he asked her aloud. Sending texts was unnecessary; Aaron would know what they were doing, what she was doing, although typically, he showed no sign he'd even noticed the activity.

"This software doesn't do Chiron, and you need a time and place of birth for an ascendant," she replied crisply. "I'm working on getting better data."

_Change gears again._

Rossi smiled. "How much of the injury visible on your body was done by Warden?"

Hotchner—perhaps unconsciously—opened his hands and studied them. "None of it," he said at last. "Well, this—" He touched a faint scar on his throat. "—is the result of an encounter with the Enforcer. As is this." He indicated another scar, even less visible, under his jaw. "And the wrist scars."

_Think. How did Hotch refer to Warden's punishments?_

"So there have been no recent—consequences?"

"No, sir."

"When was the last time there were—consequences?"

Aaron sighed visibly. "Mid-August. My escape attempt."

_Right, we saw that in the second video. He was a freaking mess._

"Must have been extensive—consequences."

Hotch barely blinked. "Yeah."

Rossi suddenly recalled how Aaron had teased him in the past over his tendency to give that little significant pause before he said a word he wanted to stress. _'Christ, Dave, you sound like a Bond villain.'_

_I'm about to get much worse than a Bond villain, Aaron. I have to rattle your cage._

"OK," Rossi said, keeping his tone as even as he could. "Please describe the consequences of your escape attempt."

_There._ That look of panic, of vulnerability—that was what he'd been looking for in Hotchner. Some sign that there was still feeling in him.

This time, there was no sigh. Hotchner took a long deep breath and let it out, then said, "He shocked me repeatedly until the battery ran down, then hit me with the Enforcer and kicked me. He took my uniform away, stripped my cell of everything but my water and my bedding, then he cuffed my hands behind me and left me in the dark for—I think it was three days."

Garcia's eyes were huge and moist; Reid was pale. Rossi fought to hide his dismay.

"And what did you do when he returned?"

Something in Aaron had shut down again. "I apologized."

_Change gears._

_And maybe while you're still sick with shame and recalled misery you'll step outside of any kind of Stockholm box you've built for yourself and answer honestly._

"Aaron, I pledge to you that this will never leave this room—" Rossi nodded at Penelope, at Spencer. "You're with me on this?" he asked them. "What we discuss now never happened?"

Penelope agreed with a nervous, fearful nod. Reid—Reid must have been seeing ghosts of himself after Tobias Henkel, because he was grim and intense. "I'm with you," he said in a whisper. "It stays here."

"Talk to me about Warden's motivations," Dave said. "Tell me why you were there, what he wanted from you. Tell me why all this happened."

Aaron nodded and something visibly shifted within him. When he spoke again, his tone was relaxed and matter-of-fact.

_This isn't good. This should be frightening territory for him._

"He saw himself as an avenger of prosecutorial injustices," he replied. "Federal prosecutorial misconduct. I was guilty of serious misconduct at one time, but I didn't have to take the fall for it. Warden claimed that justice would only be served if I suffered to the same extent as the person who got screwed over by my actions."

"And the nature of this error?"

"It wasn't an error. I've made a lot of minor errors over my lifetime, but this wasn't just an, 'oops, missed that_'_ kind of mistake. I deliberately didn't follow through on something because it was so obvious to me that the defendant was guilty and—" His eyes dropped in shame. "To follow through would have interfered with the plans I had for the evening."

Reid leaned forward. "How would he even have known about this error?"

"I have no idea. For all I know he had connections in the court system, maybe he subscribes to blogs about stupid things that lawyers do, or federal ineptitude."

"Tell me more about this error."

Again, Hotchner hesitated. "The man was convicted, sentenced, then a few years later the appeals process found the error, found out that I'd—" Aaron seemed almost unable to form the words. "That I'd suppressed exculpatory material. They found it, it proved conclusively that the poor guy—who by then had done almost five fucking years in the pen as a kiddie porn producer—was exactly what he said he was, completely innocent, and gathering evidence to bring to us against his employer."

_This is pure moonshine. What have they been feeding you, Aaron? How viciously did they have to treat you to get you to drink that Kool-Aid of self-loathing?_

"OK, let's assume, just for the moment, that this is true," Reid said, his voice unexpectedly calm and authoritative in the silence that followed that preposterous confession. "If they'd found something, Hotch, if this really happened, you'd have been disciplined. It would've been on your record. You'd never have made it into the Bureau."

"Yeah," Aaron said, his knuckles whitening. "I'm aware of that. But my boss at the time—the lead prosecutor, Van der Weese—kept me out of it. He took the hit for me. I never even knew the conviction'd been overturned until—until this happened."

"OK, if you really made this error," Rossi interrupted, "what case was it? There's a record of this somewhere, right?"

Another bleak look. "Yes, of course there is. It's, ah, U.S. v. Wassermann _et al._, 1993. The, uh, the defendant in question was Norton Charpentier, I think he—Warden said he died in, Alaska, I believe he said."

Rossi's heart sank. He recalled personally following up on that particular name, with happy Hector Whatsisname. Hobbes-Gutierrez. Norton Charpentier's conviction had indeed been overturned, and he'd collected a sizable payoff for false imprisonment. And he had, in fact, died in Alaska.

_Oh, shit._

He engaged Reid's gaze and nodded slightly. Reid's eyes widened slightly in comprehension. "And what was Warden's connection to the case?" he asked, his voice reflecting none of his new knowledge.

Hotch ran a hand through his hair. "Um, I guess you could say he was acting for the interests of Norton Charpentier," he said with a deep sigh. "He claimed to represent justice. I wasn't his first—project." He shrugged a shoulder. "But I was his last."

Believable. And minimal shading of truth. In fact, the whole description of his violation of legal ethics had been absolutely tell-free.

_Although I wish to hell he'd been lying to us on that one. Jesus, he's trusting us with a secret that could destroy any career he has left with the Bureau._

_Switch gears._

"We need a physical description," Rossi said.

Hotchner frowned. "I didn't describe him yet?"

"Not physically, no."

Aaron looked at him silently for a long moment. "That's—odd," he said. "I was sure we talked about him—"

"You talked about his characteristics," Rossi said, "and that was all good and valuable, but if and when the body ever surfaces, we have to be able to identify it."

"Of course." Hotchner gazed down at the table surface for almost a full minute, then he said, "Sometimes, in my mind, I confused him with Foyet. He could be right there in the room, and if I wasn't looking at him, I'd be picturing Foyet."

That made sense—both men had tortured Hotch physically and emotionally—and it had to take courage for a proud man like Aaron to acknowledge that. Rossi brimmed with questions, but he remained still, waiting for Hotchner to fill in the blanks without prompting. He could see it in Aaron's eyes, could see his old friend had been hoping he'd pick the questioning up from there, but that Aaron also knew why that wasn't about to happen. Aaron knew every bit as well as Rossi what an interrogator's options were.

_We both know what you're doing and we both know what I'm doing. Next move's yours, pal._

"But he didn't really look like him, like Foyet," Aaron continued, once again contemplating the table, or maybe the knuckles of his folded hands. Maybe the clear plastic port that stuck out at his right thumb joint. "Warden was maybe forty. Between thirty-eight and forty-two. Five-eleven, maybe one-eighty, barrel-chested, bull neck, looked powerful, but he wasn't really all that muscular. Not that strong. There was a flabbiness to him."

Nothing like any of their potential UNSUBS.

Hotch gnawed at his lip for a few seconds. "High, broad forehead," he added. "Longish dark hair, straight, kind of a comb-over look to it in front. Gray eyes. Small hands and feet for his size. Smart. Jesus, he was smart. And just—just about as unforgiving as a man can be. No pleasing him."

There was silence for a moment, then Dave said, keeping his voice low and steady, "I think it's about time that we talk about your escape. You up for that?"

"OK," Hotch said calmly, but Dave could sense him gathering his strength for the ordeal.

"You're pretty sure now how you got out of the bunker?"

"Yes, sir." He seemed unaware that once again he'd fallen into his Prisoner responses. "At some point—this would probably be very early on Tuesday, the fourteenth, Warden returned to the bunker with rope and flashlights. The elevator had collapsed—"

"Because of his explosives," Rossi said.

"No, sir," said Aaron gently, "although I thought so at the time. He'd misled me about the explosives because he didn't want you to try to free me. Would you like me to continue?"

_Sonofabitch thinks that he can get away with yanking the flow of this interview out from under me as long as he keeps it quiet and respectful? Not happening, Hotch._

Rossi feigned carelessness. "If you'd like."

_Neither one of us is fooling the other._

"Warden arrived shortly after midnight on Tuesday morning," said Hotchner, "with rope and flashlights. He removed the bar from the window and helped me climb through it—"

"Window? Why not use the door?"

"It had an electronic lock. The power was out. I was—reading by candlelight."

"What were you reading?" The question—as wacked-out and pointless as it might be—came from Spencer Reid.

"Um, _Footfall_," Hotchner replied. "Alien elephants—"

"Niven and Pournelle," Reid said, nodding. "It's a great book. Weird choice though, for, you know, something light to give your prisoners."

"I wouldn't know." For the first time, Hotchner showed true distress. There was no doubt whatsoever in Rossi's mind that he was there, he was reliving it. His eyes closed, his mouth hardened into a grim line. "Anyway," he said, his voice barely a whisper, "the water was rising in my cell, had been for some time by then. The power'd been out for hours, and I knew the elevator had collapsed." He met Rossi's eyes, then Reid's and Garcia's. "I knew I was going to die," he said. "I actually wrote on the wall of the cell, wrote a kind of goodbye note, in case anyone ever found me. That's why I'm so sure about the time and date."

It was desperately hard not to stop, not to picture what it had been like in that cold metal cell, with no way to save yourself from drowning. Rossi wanted to lunge across the table, to comfort Hotch, to reassure him. _Of what? That he'll get out OK? He already knows that. Stay focused._

"You had a watch?"

"The clock ran on batteries."

"Sorry," Rossi said. "Please go on."

"Warden removed the rod from the center of the window and I wiggled through it." Hotch ran his fingers through his hair a couple times and suddenly sat erect, squaring his shoulders. "I know that you're wondering why I have—a little ambivalence about Warden. He didn't have to come back for me. He could have just left me there, let the water cover up the evidence. But he risked his own life to come back for me, and he never once tried to restrain me in any way while we were making our way through there.

"He never tried to get assurances from me that I wouldn't run away from him, that I wouldn't tell you everything I knew about him, about the bunker. We were in there for hours; he knew his way around the cave, but we wound up in old parts of the mine, crawling through a foot of water in total darkness, no idea where we were, except we figured that as long as we were headed against the flow, we were headed toward the outside.

"He yanked me out of the water twice when I'd gone under and couldn't get oriented, and I couldn't keep him from falling down in the mudslide. So, yeah." Hotchner's eyes glistened. "Some ambivalence going on there." He cleared his throat. "And I think I've about had it for today, Dave. Besides, Jack, Jess, and Sean'll be here before long."

"Works for me," Rossi said gently. "Thanks for your cooperation." He looked up. "Reid, will you walk Aaron back to his room?"

Hotch threw him a disgusted, _'Hey, I know the way'_ look, but his heart evidently wasn't in it, because when he stood up, when he straightened, adjusting his weight to accommodate his knee, his feet, his cane, he waited until Reid was at the door before he began walking.

"God," Rossi moaned to himself. Part of him was still trying to comprehend the horror of hours crawling through cold water, with your life utterly dependent yet again on the good will of your tormentor.

_Ambivalence. Yeah, I guess._

"I know," Penelope said, and he'd forgotten all about her for a moment. "Do you have a few minutes, though? Because I think I'm onto something here."

"Onto something like what?"

"It's the astrology," she said. "I thought it was just, you know, background noise. Useless crap."

"Garcia, sweetheart, if you're gonna tell me that the whole captivity thing was in the fucking stars or something, I'm gonna just put in for my goddamn retirement now."

"Fear not, my hero," she said. "Nothing woo-woo here, just facts. You like facts, right?"

"I _love_ facts, honey."

OK, it's like this," she said, her furry little hoot-owl pen waggling frantically in her fingers as she read from her pages of notes. "Chiron is actually in Aquarius right now. It has a crazy, crazy path, years in one sign, then a few months in another, then it reverses, then it comes back. In the past ten years, it's been in Aquarius three times, even though it hasn't been in more of the other signs at all. It's like it's doing this little dance, into Aquarius, step backward into Capricorn, forward, then forward again in Pisces, then back to Aquarius."

Rossi wished that made any kind of sense to him. "Just tell me why I need to know this."

"It's important," she said. "I'm not sure why yet, but it is. See, Hotch was born in November of '65, right? OK, Chiron entered Pisces on, ah, January 21, 1961. It sat there in Pisces for seven years, until April 1, 1968, when it advanced to Aries."

"Still waiting for something that means something to me."

"OK, Warden claimed that his Chiron was in Aquarius. Chiron entered Aquarius on February 21, 2005. We know Warden isn't some five-year-old kid, right? So the last time Chiron was in Aquarius was between 1955 and January of 1961, so he was born in fall of '55 through '60. That makes him fifty to fifty-five years old. Somebody like Warden, somebody who's, like, thirty-eight to forty-two, the way Hotch described him, that guy's born '68 to '72, so he's probably Chiron in Aries."

Rossi felt as though he might be going mad. "And your point?"

"He _lied to Hotch__!_ He gave someone else's astrological data!" Her eyes widened. "Oh, shit, of course, hang on, what's his DOB?" She punched keys and gave an exultant crow. "Yes! Yes!"

David Rossi sighed deeply. "No, no," he said softly. "I'm still lost here."

Garcia's animated features positively glowed. "Norton Charpentier!" she all but squealed. "I just ran the numbers! Warden used the birth data of the guy he was taking vengeance for, Norton Charpentier, when he talked to Hotch about astrology! It's like he'd—you know, taken on his identity! Like, maybe he even believed that he _was _Charpentier!"

"As I recall," Rossi said, "Charpentier was morbidly obese."

"He was five-eight, three-forty, according to his 1991 Maryland driver's license," Garcia said, staring at her screen. "Holy cats, he was a Happy Meal short of cardiac arrest. Look at him."

"Yeah, that's probably what killed him," Rossi told her. "He decided—with no preparation and no training—to canoe his way up an Alaskan river."

Garcia's brows knit behind her jeweled cat glasses. "You think maybe that's why Warden was, you know, flabby? Hotch said there was a flabbiness to him. You think maybe he was putting on weight so he'd identify more strongly with Charpentier?"

"We'll probably never know for sure," Dave told her, "but it sounds like you may be on to something there."


	50. Attitudes of Gratitude

A/N: It looks as if we're maybe 2-4 chapters from the end here, but there are still a few surprises in store for you and for our favorite agents! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world.

While the ending for this story is set in stone, we're interested in what you want to see, what you're still curious about, potential loose ends. _Please feel free to PM starofoberon with your questions and feelings_ as this story races to its conclusion!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Fifty**

**Attitudes of Gratitude**

Reid knew that it was less than intelligent to want Hotchner up _now_, at the top of his game _now_, considering that he himself had been at Tobias Henkel's mercy for forty-eight hours and it had taken more than a week before he was ready to return to work. Aaron had been gone for _four months_, to the day. He'd been free for three days now, the first of which he'd spent flat on his back, unconscious. By Reid's own measure (if such things were truly on a one-to-one correspondence, which of course they weren't) Hotch would be good to go in January of 2012.

After his devastating abandonment by Jason Gideon, Reid had worked hard at not turning any of his superiors into a father figure. He'd celebrated the kid-brother relationship that Morgan had developed with him. And yet—too many years without a father, and look at him: monster IQ and all, he was once again looking to a Team member as his rock, his dad. His security.

_So what's Jessica then, smartypants? Jocasta? No, only if she was sleeping with Hotch. She wasn't, was she? Damn. Who's he slept with?_ He remembered talking about Hotch, talking about his fidelity one night with Jessica. She hadn't demonstrated any tells to indicate that she'd been, you know, _doing it_, with Hotch, had she?

He flushed hot. _But you weren't looking for tells of sleeping with Aaron, were you? You were pretty much lost in how her nipples subtly changed colors when she was aroused, in the way her eyes widened and her pupils dilated when she looked at you, Spencer Reid, the unlikely Lothario of the BAU._

The door to Hotch's bathroom squeaked slightly, and the man himself limped out, knuckles white as they clung to the handle of his cane. _Must be the shoes_, Reid decided. _He walked better than this yesterday._

Aaron fell gratefully into the bed. He looked tired. He'd looked tired _constantly_ since his return. Dr. Marx had suggested that he'd lost almost all of his endurance during his captivity; that in spite of that he'd spent hours struggling through the flood, and it would take a while before he built up anything like a reasonable energy level.

"You can go, you know," Hotch told Reid. "It's not like I'm going anywhere."

"I'm fine," Reid replied. He picked up a particularly stupid-looking stuffed lion in a deerstalker cap. It squeaked. _You'd have to travel a ways to find anything more pointless than a grinning terrycloth squeaking lion in a Sherlock Holmes hat._ "I'm happy to be here, Hotch. I'm not just here to protect you, you know—"

That bought a glare from Hotchner. "Warden is _dead_," he snapped. "There's nobody to protect me _from_."

"I'm also here to provide a contact point with the Team so you aren't out of the loop about what we're doing," Spencer finished smoothly. "That, and protecting you from the screaming Bureau groupies assembled in the lobby."

That got him one hell of a sharp look.

"Reid?"

"Sir?"

"Did you just—make a joke?"

Spencer smiled. "Maybe." He squeezed Sherlock the squeaking lion's abdomen a few more times. "More of a wisecrack, I believe. Where'd you get the MP3 player?"

Hotchner checked his watch for the third time since they'd returned to the room. "From Dr. and Mrs.—No, I guess it's Dr. and Dr. Hawthorne. They dropped it off this morning."

"And it already has music on it? What did it come with?"

"Reid, your thirst for knowledge can be wearing."

Reid responded by squeaking the lion. "I know, Mr. Sher-Lion," he said to the stuffed toy, trying for a sing-songy, cartoony voice. "Don't worry about him; you have nothing to do with it. He's always been grumpy."

Hotchner fumbled around among papers and cards and notes on his dinner tray. When he found one piece of paper, he picked up the handset on the room's phone—this was new, he'd made no phone calls at all so far—dialed 9, then punched in a number. Reid could hear a voicemail menu but couldn't make out the words.

Finally, Hotchner said, "Yes, this is Aaron Hotchner. You were right, so, sure, the sooner the better. My schedule is—" He gave a soft, ironic laugh. "—pretty flexible. Thanks." He hung up and sank back among the pillows.

**~ o ~**

The man born Norton Charpentier, the man now calling himself Joseph McAfee, fell gratefully into the wheelchair. Every muscle, every joint ached, and the shattered leg now held together with pins and titanium splints only came in second this morning. His first session in physical therapy, trying to ambulate on crutches with five cracked ribs, had been a nightmare. It hurt more to move his arms than to move his legs.

As the pimply transportation kid (Garth or Travis or Randy or some other name that McAfee associated with country music) pushed him back to his room down bustling Friday morning corridors, he thought, _Why do I bother? The police will be here soon enough, and there'll be no PT in prison. He's conscious, he's talking. What's the holdup? _

He rolled back into his room, festive with cards and flowers, silly stuffed animals and goofy gifts from faculty and students, from friends around the state. He hoped to hell that if he hadn't been arrested yet by the weekend, there'd be no PT then. One day was quite enough, thanks very much.

"Do you need help getting back into bed?" Garth-or-Travis asked.

"Nah, I'm getting pretty good at this," he replied, reaching down to lock the chair into place even before the kid could get to it himself. He gritted his teeth, braced his hands on the arm rests, focused on his injured leg and its precise position, and concentrated on not bumping it against anything. Slowly, he forced himself upright.

_Jesus. What's it come to, that this is a major breakthrough?_

He shifted his weight, pivoted, and planted his ass on the mattress. _Touchdown, baby. _

"Good going," the transportation kid said. "You did that just as slick as snot, man."

_I'll take my props anywhere I can get them._

"Thanks," McAfee said, glancing up at the kid and spotting his name tag._ Parton. _The kid's first name was Parton. _You'd think I'd have noticed that; it was a kid named Barton who killed Diana. Maybe I'm starting to heal__ after all__._

**~ o ~**

"It's all good," Morgan said into his mobile as he strode across the crowded parking lot of the Altoona Eat 'n' Park. "Yes, ma'am, Rossi's taking the laydown to Hotch, JJ'll be staying here for the duration—yes, I got that cleared; it's 'light duty'—and I'll be sending Prentiss down to Weirton."

He shoved open the door to the restaurant as Erin Strauss fussed in his ear. This wasn't even a case—it was a recovery, a marvelous conclusion—yet he felt as exhausted, as frustrated, as he did when they were in the middle of a case that was going nowhere fast.

God, but he was tired of this Unit Chief crap! He was as ambitious as the next guy—OK, a lot _more_ ambitious than the next guy—but he still loved the feel of a door collapsing against his boot almost as much as he enjoyed watching an UNSUB fall apart under interrogation. This constant administrative bullshit, though, the expression "being nibbled to death by ducks" didn't even come _close_ to describing it. He'd been in the job four months now and still was discovering forms he'd never heard of that were required, like, _immediately_, to satisfy legal requirements he'd never heard of, either. This is a job for a damn lawyer, he thought. A damn lawyer with balls of steel and a gift for profiling.

_Hurry the hell up and get better, Hotch._

"Yes, ma'am," he said for what had to be the fifteenth time since he'd taken the call. "Yes, ma'am, more later." He dropped the phone into his pocket and his ass into a chair opposite Emily Prentiss. Bless her heart, she had coffee there, waiting for him.

"I love you, Princess," he said, after a long, contented drink.

"Of course you do. Sleep well?"

"As well as I ever do these days," he admitted. "And you, pretty thing, have a scenic drive in your future."

"Oh, I do? Around here, everything involves a scenic drive. And since when do you sweet-talk me like you do Garcia?"

Another long sip. God, this stuff was an improvement over the crap in the motel lobby! "Since I'm sending you to West Virginia for the morning."

She almost slopped her fruit smoothie on her shirt. "Where?"

"About ninety minutes south of here, just outside Weirton."

"I can hardly wait. What's in Weirton?"

"Frankly, not much. It's a little rust-belt valley between two casino resorts. But there's a woman there, Theresa Cable, who's the sister of Norton Charpentier."

"And he's who?"

"He was a guy who was allegedly wrongly convicted by Hotch."

"He's Warden?"

"It would make sense, but no. Charpentier died in '98. But Warden—and we have a physical description now, and he looks nothing like Fur Face—Warden told Hotch that he was avenging Charpentier's false imprisonment, and probably his death. He knew a lot about Charpentier, and he has to have picked it up somewhere. Charpentier's only living relatives are his mom in Venice, Florida, and his sister—twin sister, actually—who now lives and works in Weirton. She's an office manager, but she's off today."

"So who's Fur Face?"

Morgan shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. Hired hand? Hotch said he thought Warden had some help at some point. Anyhow, this is what I just got from Garcia." He took the slim sheaf of folded papers from his jacket pocket and presented them to Emily. "I'll keep chasing this Pearson guy, the so-called psychotherapist. He's just too smooth, has too damned many fast answers."

**~ o ~**

They really looked sweet together, Reid thought, watching Hotch do some weird nose-to-nose thing with his son, both of them laughing. Just beyond them, Jessica—

_Really have to end that, but I don't know how and I don't really want to…._

—Jessica was smiling, her hands joined at her lips—_I love it when she does that, it's so little-girlish_—and she looked at Reid and he melted.

_And it has to stop because if she thinks for one minute we're gonna fool Aaron Hotchner into believing nothing's going on, she's not as smart as she thinks she is._

Then she gasped and checked her phone. "Text," she said. "It's Sean, he's like totally turned around. I'm gonna go out and get my map and see if I can get him headed right."

"Uncle Sean?" Jack said, his eyes wide. "Tell him to get one of those GPF thingies, like Daddy has."

Jessica chuckled. "I'll do that. Better yet, why don't you tell him?"

"Can I, Daddy? I mean, can I help Aunt Jess?"

His father sighed and grinned. "Go ahead, go with Aunt Jess, you can be 'avigator' for your Uncle Sean."

The boy looked from his father to his aunt and then back.

"Really," Hotch insisted. "I'll still be here when you get back. I'm not going anywhere."

The boy scampered off after Jessica. Aaron watched him with obvious affection, then turned to Reid. "Frankly, I'm pretty worn out," he confessed. "I don't know why, because I'm just lying here, but sometimes it seems like all I'm doing is sleeping."

"Go ahead," Reid told him. "You won't get much rest once they're back."

"Suppose you're right," Aaron admitted. He toed his shoes off—entirely failing to disguise the sigh of gratitude as they left his feet—and reluctantly lowered his headboard all the way. In just a couple of minutes he was sound asleep, snoring softly.

Reid settled back as best he could in the uncomfortable visitor's chair and closed his eyes, not to rest but in order to concentrate more intently on the information they'd managed to get so far from Hotch about his time in captivity and Warden. He knew Hotch was holding stuff back, but whether it was from embarrassment at what he'd been forced to do, guilt at his inability to save Warden, Stockholm Syndrome, or from some other reason entirely, Reid wasn't sure. Hotchner called it "ambivalence," but it was stronger than that.

He was becoming more and more convinced Stockholm was playing a part in Hotch's unusual behavior, but with Warden dead that complicated things a bit. Hotch knew as much about Stockholm as any of them, maybe more, but that still didn't make him immune to it.

He put those thoughts aside and mentally reviewed both Hotch's words and behavior since the moment the Team had arrived. The confusion, the memories that returned in bits and pieces, the tendency to slip into respectful replies, calling them _sir,_ the baffling references—what in God's name was the _paper clip thing_?

A noise at the door startled Reid, and his eyes flew open. It was a nurse, carrying a little paper cup of meds for Hotch.

He gestured at the sleeping man and made the universal "shhhh" gesture at the nurse. "Can you come back later?" he asked her quietly. "He's only got about a half-hour before his son gets back, and the kid's pretty high energy."

She hesitated, looking from Spencer to the sleeping figure, then said, "I'm sorry, but there's a good reason for the regulations." She raised her voice slightly. "Agent Hotchner?" she said. "Aaron?"

Hotch opened his eyes, blinked, fixated on the paper cup, and extended a hand. She decanted the pills into his palm and reached for his water glass, but before she could even get her fingers around it, he'd dry-swallowed them and was settling back into his pillows.

She smiled nervously at Reid. "Well, at least I wasn't waking him up to give him sleeping pills."

Reid watched as Hotchner's breathing slowed, as his body relaxed. They'd seen Hotch given an injection, and he'd confirmed that he'd been drugged. Had Warden given him pills, too? This automatic acceptance of the meds, this dry-swallowing without question, was that a sort of institutionalization, a behavior he'd learned in order to survive?

Worried, Reid studied the sleeping form. _What have they done to you?_

And because for a bright guy he could make some dumb decisions, he said, "Hotch?"

Hotchner stirred beneath the bedclothes. "Prisoner, sir," he mumbled thickly.

Reid mentally kicked himself. _Leave the poor man alone, for God's sake, let him get some rest. Even bad dreams are a therapy of sorts. Unless he totally freaks, just sit back and let him deal with it the best he can. Maybe in his dream state he'll even provide some more insight into what happened to him._

The long, lean body tossed slightly. He rolled over onto his less-injured side, then grasped fistfuls of bedclothes, his already-pale knuckles whitening further as his grip on them tightened.

"No!" he gasped suddenly, and Reid glanced up in alarm. Then Hotchner mumbled, "Can't, please. Did everything you—" He thrashed fitfully. "Please, please—can't do that."

All Reid's senses snapped into high alert. _What the hell?!_ Should he rush out to get Morgan and Rossi or wait, in case Hotch said even more?

A moment later the matter resolved itself as Hotch tossed, his features twisted in misery. This time his voice came out in a mere whisper. "You're here," he said. Spencer looked up to find Hotchner regarding him from half-closed eyes.

"Yeah," Reid said, "still here. Are you all right?"

"Thought it was a test," Hotchner whimpered. "Made all those promises, the—the drugs—"

"The drugs were OK," Reid said cautiously. "The nurse brought them. Really, they were—"

"He promised—" Hotch's voice was, if anything, even weaker now. "Tell me he didn't hurt you. Promised you wouldn't—be injured—"

A chill swept over him as he recalled Aaron's first words to him on Wednesday night: "Hurt you?" And his pairing the two of them: "Where are we?" rather than "Where am I?" _Oh my God! Warden was going to take me too? Surely Hotch would never have gone along with that!_ Then he remembered Hotch's tone of horror, and the words, "Thought it was a test."

In the bed, Hotchner shivered uncontrollably. His skin tone, ghostly after months in captivity, turned ashen. _That does it,_ Reid thought. _Have to stop this now! _But before he could even get to his feet or utter a single word, Hotch's body relaxed. He was once again lost in dreams.

"Yes, sir," he breathed. "What do you want?"

Spencer Reid decided, for better or for worse, to go with his instincts. Without a clue what Warden's voice might have sounded like, he intoned, "I want you to go to sleep. I want you to rest and get better. Will you do that for me?"

The form in the bed murmured, "Yes, sir."

Reid leaned back in his chair, thrust his hands deep into his pants pockets, and wondered whether he'd just broken all records for smart-guy stupidity. Now the question was: should he ask Hotch about this later, or just leave it alone? Would talking about it help Hotch heal faster, or cause a dangerous setback?

**~ o ~**

Fear flickered in the woman's eyes when Emily introduced herself as an FBI agent and asked for a few moments of her time.

This was no surprise—fear flickers in most people's eyes, fear of what they or a loved one might have said or done, fear that a loved one might be a victim somewhere. Fear is natural when Authority arrives at your door. Its very arrival means that something, somewhere, is seriously amiss.

"Of course," Mrs. Cable said after a moment's hesitation. She glanced at the credentials long enough to confirm Emily's name and photo, and opened the door to her tiny house on a shallow hillside. "Won't you come in? Pardon the mess."

Theresa Charpentier Cable was a slender woman of average height, just short of fifty, with a weary face and sorrowful eyes. She wore reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. Her hair was cropped short and dyed champagne blonde. Like Erin Strauss, she seemed to favor neutral shades. Her clothing and her living room seemed mostly variations on a theme of beige. The only attention-grabbers in the narrow room were a figure of Christ crucified on a large cross of gold filigree, and what appeared to be an original painting of a white sailboat tacking into the winds of a stormy purple sky.

Prentiss wasn't sure what "mess" she was supposed to be pardoning. The place seemed neat and tidy, almost featureless. There were two family photos in evidence: a young girl in a gold graduation cap and gown beaming into the camera, and a formal portrait of an older woman in a colorful dashiki wearing a jangling collection of Native American jewelry.

"I'd like to talk to you, if I may, about your brother," Emily said.

Something odd flashed in her eyes and one hand flew to the thin gold chain at her throat. "What?" she whispered. "Is there—did they—" Her hand dropped back into her lap. "Never mind. How can I help you?"

"There's someone out there who's really angry about the deal your brother got back in '93," Emily began. "Someone who appointed himself Mr. Charpentier's avenger."

The woman's complexion paled. "I don't know what you mean."

_Oh, go ahead. Say it._ "Is there a chance your brother might still be alive, Mrs. Cable?"

Her fingers twisted together tightly on one bony knee. "I used to hope for that," she said at last. "They say twins can, you know, they can sense when they—lose each other. But Norton and I weren't identical, of course. Just fraternal. We did have a special bond, but it was just from growing up together. We didn't get any special vibes across the miles.

"So, no. There's no chance that Nort's alive. He had almost nothing in common with Dad, but he was a Charpentier down to the bone, and _we just don't walk away from money_. When he died, he left about a hundred and twenty thousand in the bank. They found his money belt not far from the bank of the river where he—where they think he—anyway, it had six grand in cash and eleven grand in uncashed traveler's checks. Norton had a Harvard business degree, Agent, and he was a Charpentier. There's no way he walked away from that money."

Prentiss nodded. "Can you tell me a little about the trial, Mrs. Cable?"

The woman seemed to gather her strength and determination. "I can," she said, "but it isn't pretty. I've been married three times. My first husband, Alan Ryerson, was a great guy, and we have a daughter, Melissa. She's twenty-six." She nodded almost unconsciously toward the photo of the smiling graduate. "Alan passed, and I married Gerald Sinclair. Jerry was—oh, he seemed like the perfect man, charming, handsome, generous, _going places_. But Nort didn't like Jerry, and I couldn't figure out why. We'd always visited back and forth as families, Nort and his wife and daughter and us and our daughter—they were close in age. But that stopped. And what confused me was, if Nort disliked Jerry so much, why did he start working for him? He had a perfectly good consulting business of his own. Why did he suddenly start spending three days a week working with Jerry?

"Then there was the raid, and it was like my life fell apart. I lost my husband and my brother and my reputation, _boom_, just like that. And the things Jerry told me! He said he'd invited Nortie to work for him because he wanted to keep an eye on him, that he'd seen Nortie—" She drew a long steadying breath. "He'd seen Nortie looking funny at Missy. And I believed him!" Mrs. Cable's eyes glistened. "I believed the sonofabitch, I lied for him in court, and I lied against Norton in court. And it was the exact opposite, only I didn't find that out until Nortie was dead. It was in '99 that Missy—my baby, my angel—she was fifteen, and you know what kind of stuff comes out when you're fifteen—she accused me of not protecting her from _Jerry_. The sonofabitch molested her! He wanted to put her in his sick movies!"

"Guys like that," Emily said gently, because she'd read the file Garcia put together, and she dealt with slime like Jerry Sinclair every day, "they're terrific liars. They have no conscience so they don't feel guilty, and they don't feel any responsibility toward the truth. There's no sense of, oh, 'somewhere down the line she'll find out the truth and it'll devastate her.' They just don't care."

Mrs. Cable burst into open tears, apparently grateful for the understanding. "He told me up was down, in was out, and black was white—and I believed him!"

"Interestingly," Prentiss continued, "it's easier for females to identify a female sociopath, and for males to sense a male sociopath. They don't seem to have much trouble fooling the opposite sex. Believe me, you're far from the first, and I assure you, ma'am, you won't be the last to fall for their magic."

"I fell twice," she said, her voice oddly muffled. "Married Lee Cable in '03. I fell for the sizzle again, handsome, charming, generous, confident—and, OK, he didn't diddle kiddies, but he was a gambler and a con artist.

"And look at me now," she concluded bitterly. "Two ex-husbands in the penitentiary. Must be some kind of record. And I've just barely managed to build a connection to my daughter again. So, I've had it with marriage. I went back to the Church, I'm finding a way to use my time and my passion for good, for the Lord." She gave a deep sigh. "What else can I tell you? And why are you asking?"

"Did you follow the story of the kidnapped FBI agent?"

Mrs. Cable frowned. "The one with the shoot-out in, what was it, Montana? Wyoming?"

"Colorado," Emily said, "and, no. The other one. The one who was found in the flooding earlier this week."

Another, deeper frown. "Oh, over in Greater Pennsyltucky?"

"That's the one."

"I—I saw a little of it. It wasn't the kind of thing that interests me these days. We're getting ready for the parish Oktoberfest."

"The agent was Aaron Hotchner."

Mrs. Cable's face showed nothing. "I'm sorry, am I missing something?"

"He was part of the prosecution team at your brother's and your husband's trial. You didn't recognize the name?"

She thought about that. Finally she shook her head. "Mostly I remember that vicious old man with the jowls. Vanden, Vander something. Van der Weese. And somebody-Desmond."

Prentiss pulled out her tablet and called up a picture of Aaron Hotchner that Jessica had given them, one from about that time.

"Oh," Theresa Cable said. "I don't remember him specifically. I can't swear that that's him, but there was one guy, real young, tall, too much hair. Pretty full of himself."

"That was Aaron Hotchner," Emily said. "He was abducted in May of this year. Held prisoner for four months, beaten and locked in an underground cell. He escaped just the day before yesterday." She leaned forward. "He was told he was being punished for his role in convicting Norton Charpentier."

Mrs. Cable's hands flew to her mouth and a look of utter panic crossed her features. _She's thinking she could be next,_ Emily realized. _She knows she also contributed to her brother's conviction. _

"We have reason to believe that the man who did this is dead now," Emily said, and she could see relief flooding through Theresa Cable's body. "But he had a lot of information about your brother, about his trial and about him, personally. Did Norton have any interest in astrology?"

Theresa Cable's face said _No_ a full second before she said, "Not a chance. It's garbage, and Norton was pretty much devoted to science. Besides, he was committed to the Church—he even thought about going to seminary for a while. Astrology's, you know, like witchcraft. If it isn't a direct sin, it's just asking for trouble, spiritually speaking."

"Can you think of anyone who might have had an interest in avenging Norton's conviction?"

The woman shook her head slowly. "Maybe one of Diana's brothers? They all liked Nortie; we all grew up together, the Sheehans lived down the street from us in Towson."

"Can you give me their names and addresses?"

Mrs. Cable frowned again. "I don't know how up-to-date they'll be. The Sheehans stopped talking to me after—well, they kept it civil during the trial, for the sake of Missy and Ellie, because the girls had been close. After Diana and Ellie died, they just—cut us out of their lives. Not that I can blame them—"

Prentiss's phone vibrated. She took it out of her pocket and stared at the text from Garcia for a few baffled seconds.

"Mrs. Cable," she said to the woman, who had taken an old-fashioned address file out of the drawer of the coffee table, "one more question?"

"Yes?"

"Ma'am, can you think of any reason why your ex-husband Gerald Sinclair might have spent six thousand dollars in early July to buy a complete transcript of his trial—including Norton's malicious prosecution hearing?"


	51. Saturday Morning Therapy

A/N: It looks as if we're maybe 2-4 chapters from the end here, but there are still a few surprises in store for you and for our favorite agents! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world.

While the ending for this story is set in stone, we're interested in what you want to see, what you're still curious about, potential loose ends. _Please feel free to PM starofoberon with your questions and feelings_ as this story races to its conclusion!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Fifty-One**

**Saturday Morning Therapy**

Friday passed, mercifully free of major incidents. Aaron surrendered to reality and allowed his brother to roll him down to the little quadrangle in a wheelchair—because Jack wanted to ride on his lap and because Sean liked the idea of pushing him around—and he and Jess and Sean sat at a picnic table in the sun, the fucking glorious sun, actually feeling its rays on his flesh for the first time since May, and watched Jack and a set of four-year-old twin girls playing on the swing set.

The Team seemed to have reached the conclusion that Warden was dead and they could stop scrambling to find accomplices. They'd also stopped constantly hovering over him as though they expected him to drop dead, freak out, or lay a clutch of eggs if they turned their backs on him. When he finally turned off the TV in the middle of some Lifetime true crime chickflick and shut down his computer (which Jessica'd brought to him) he dared to think that in time, his life might just meander back to normality.

**~ o ~**

No matter how fast he ran, he couldn't catch up with the car. Had he recognized that he was dreaming, he might have just shrugged. _Screw it. In my dreams, I'm always a failure._ Since that isn't the nature of dreams, however, he continued to pelt down the street in frantic pursuit of some sedan or other that contained some out-of-focus UNSUB.

"Aaron," Dave Rossi was saying, and Aaron turned to his left, to the older man racing beside him. He tried to say '_What?'_ but didn't have the breath. In fact, he couldn't breathe at all.

"Aaron?"

_Drowning._ He watched the gray waters close over his head, tried to reach out, tried at least to touch the air with his fingers—

"Aaron." The voice was low and gentle, warm and reassuring.

His face broke free of the waters and he took a huge, desperate gulp of air, filling his lungs—

"There you are," Rossi said, barely a silhouette in the dark. "Must have been some dream."

"Breadfruit," he assured the senior profiler. "I was living on breadfruit. And it was terrible. It was just fucking tasteless." It was more than that, but he was damned if he'd tell Rossi about the car and drowning.

"In the cell? With Warden?"

"Shit. No, no." He scrubbed his face with both hands. "It's the meds," he said, still struggling to break free of the gray mists dragging him down. "Crazy dreams, they're trying to adjust the dosage but I guess—haven't hit on the right numbers yet."

"It's OK, Aaron."

Hotchner blinked and looked around. He still tended to look up and slightly to his right for the brushed metal clock Warden had attached to the wall of his cell. He raised his left wrist: 5:22 in the morning. He snapped on the reading light, looked around at the flowers, planters, cards, and balloons. Looked at Dave Rossi. There was something weirdly temporary about him. He groped for the bed controls, found them, and raised his headboard.

_Wonder if this is a dream, too._

"'Sup?" he said, finally connecting fully with his surroundings.

"Not a whole bunch," said Rossi. "You're sure you're completely awake?"

Hotchner's lip twitched. "As awake as I get recently."

"OK, Aaron, this is the deal: that rat bastard in Eau Claire, the guy who was burying them alive, we think he's active again."

Old instincts kicked in and instantly he had the relevant facts about the case at the forefront of his mind—_and the roofer, the roofer with the weird eyes and plumber's butt, still think he's gonna be our guy_—and he'd actually tensed his body preparatory to climbing out of bed, when it hit him.

_No, I'm not going. They're _leaving.

_This is how Jack feels when I have to say goodbye to him suddenly in the middle of the night._

Jealous, deflated, depressed, he put on his best game face. "Good luck out there," he said, but his head buzzed with a thousand thoughts, a million doubts.

"You'll still have JJ to keep your ass in line," Rossi assured him.

"She isn't going?" _What the fuck? They can't trust me even now?_

"She got blown out a window, Aaron. She's still on light duty, has another week to go before she can get certified to return."

He gave the best fake nod of understanding he could manage. "Go nail him, Dave," he said. He reached for the switch to his lamp. "I'll keep JJ safe for you."

After Rossi left, he lay there in the dark for a long time, at first just idly wondering how long it would take him to get re-certified. Would Strauss show up at the house again with another retirement package under her arm? Would some panel decide that he was too damaged, too lacking in confidence, to resume a leadership position? Too damaged to serve at all, perhaps?

Dread gripped him suddenly, a terror more ferocious than anything he'd felt in the cell since his first few days. _What if they turn me away? What if the combination of physical weakness and psychological stress, the exposure of my prosecutorial misconduct—my willful misleading of the Team to protect Warden…Christ, without the Team, what the fuck am I?_

The sky began to lighten. The night shift did its last check, yes, he was still breathing, blood still circulating, still maintaining his body heat. The breakfast tray arrived. The day shift came in, fresh and chirpy, and determined all over again that he was still breathing, check. Blood circulating, check. The nurse studied him as he picked listlessly at his eggs.

"How are you doing this morning?" she asked, her arms folded across her chest.

"Fine," he said woodenly. _Just go away. Leave me alone_.

"You're sure about that?"

"Positive."

"You have a PRN order for—"

"I don't need anything," he snapped.

_Yes, I do. I'm having a fucking panic attack. I survived four months with Warden and the idea of being out of a job has me a wreck. The minute I start to think about it, my heart just about leaps out of my chest, I break out in a cold sweat, and my insides start churning._

"Fine," she said, her voice soothing, unruffled. She wasn't buying it, not for a minute. "Call me if you need anything."

He looked at his watch again. Wondered whether it was a bigger sign of weakness to ask for medication for anxiety, or to deny that he needed some when he so obviously did. Wondered whether it was too early to call Dr. Pearson.

**~ o ~**

"_You have to help me," he'd rasped to Dr. Marx in the few minutes he'd had alone with him, which had meant, of course, while he was being examined. "I'm not stupid, I know I need to see a therapist. But I don't want one from the Bureau. Ouch," he added._

"_Turn a little more. I'm sure Dr. Wu can recommend some excellent—"_

"_Doesn't have to be excellent," Aaron had panted. "You can stop that any old time now—"_

"_Just a little more—"_

"_Fuck!" he'd wheezed. "OK, better. Listen, the most important thing is that whoever it is, he or she has to be independent. A maverick, a lone wolf, whatever. The kind of person who's wired to mistrust the government. Who'll take some agency's demands to discuss my case with them and—ow, dammit—tell 'em to fuck off."_

"_All through. How old is this incision?"_

"_Um, a year ago May."_

"_That would be the first Reaper incident?"_

_Hotchner had sighed wearily. "Yeah."_

"_Any complications?"_

"_No."_

"_Well, that's good to hear. I'll talk to Gil Wu. Oh—and although your people have claimed the right to reasonable information on your condition, that ends now that you're awake and alert. And I won't tell them what you just asked for."_

"_Thanks."_

**~ o ~**

"How are your mice?" McKinley Pearson said. Hotchner found his voice soothing; he managed to sound both compassionate and snarky, which basically meant that he sounded like every agent in the BAU.

"They're—there," Aaron replied. "Not so much as before, but still there." With much fear and embarrassment, he'd described them as looking like small mice or large palmetto bugs, those shimmering _things_ that seemed to travel across the periphery of his vision when he was least expecting them. It was comforting that Pearson referred to them as mice rather than visions or hallucinations, that when he raised the subject he seemed casual, almost dismissive.

They were meeting in a small conference room on the other end of the same corridor where he'd met with Rossi and Reid on Friday morning. The chairs were better padded, the floor was carpeted rather than tiled, and the window overlooked the emergency entrance. Both men, patient and shrink, wore jeans and red knit shirts. The only hint as to which was which was that the better groomed of the two had a tell-tale plastic port installed beside his right thumb.

"Let's give it at least another twenty-four hours before we try anything chemical," Pearson said. "See whether we can nail down whether this is neurological. You took some pretty solid whacks to the head, remember. Talk to me," he added sharply. "That's the deal, Aaron. Don't shut me out. I want to know everything that's going on back there behind your eyes."

"Yeah, OK," Aaron said. "Worrying. Catastrophizing, maybe. Wondering which diagnosis is more likely to shitcan my career: seeing things because I'm under stress, or seeing things because I have brain damage."

"Four days," said Pearson. "You've been here four days. How likely is it that getting impatient about how fast you lose those residual symptoms will hurry the process for you?"

Any vague hope Aaron might have had that the question was rhetorical crashed and burned when he realized that Pearson was still sitting at the table, unmoving as stone, hands folded, and waiting for an answer.

"Unlikely," he conceded.

"I hear an unspoken 'but,'" said Pearson.

"Yeah. Yeah, there's another case. They're off to Wisconsin." He waited, hoping that Pearson would say something. When the unkempt psychiatrist just waited, with that mildly amused but infinitely caring look on his face, Hotchner wished maybe Dr. Wu had found a slightly less expert therapist for him.

"Yeah, OK, I wanted them gone," he said at last, trying not to sound petulant. "But not—not like that, damn it. And I'm just sitting here, doing nothing."

"Nothing."

"Jesus Christ, get off me, Mac. Nothing. Eating. Sleeping. Walking the goddamn halls. They're off to put away a guy who buries teenage girls alive! And I'm—taking up fucking space."

"How many minutes of walking are you up to now?"

"Nineteen minutes this morning, but I wussed out and wore the footies." Hotchner frowned. "What's so damn funny?"

"Physically wussy, right, not taking the hit and wearing the shoes. Psychologically, you might say ballsy. Ballsy to take the hit to your pride and wear the footies so you can build up your endurance faster. There's all kinds of wussy. Which kind of wussy accomplishes more for you today? What do you think, Aaron?"

"I think I like you better when you're just sitting there doing your Sphinx thing."

"You're not alone," Pearson said calmly. "What else is new and interesting in your life?"

And that was why he'd asked for a therapist who was by nature disinclined to give anything to a government agency. He might, if pressed, have confessed to some Bureau counselor that he was seeing—mice. But there was nobody else in the world to whom he could speak the words that finally tumbled out: "He's definitely alive. Sorry, _probably_ definitely alive. The couple I was talking about, they referred to him in the present tense. I don't think that was an accident."

"Go on."

"Go on how? You mean, how do I feel about this? What am I going to do about it?"

"Sounds like a reasonable place to start," Pearson said.

"I'm—I'm grateful," Aaron said, thinking about his words. "I don't want him to be dead."

"And your team?"

"I think that they'd prefer for him to be alive. Failing that, dead." Only after he said it did he realize how fatuous that sounded. "Sorry, let me clarify that: I mean their preference would for him to be alive and in custody. Second choice would be dead. Currently we're in option three, he's alive and not in custody."

Dr. Pearson nodded slightly. "How would you order-score those options?"

Hotchner hesitated. "I don't—I'm not—I think that at this time, I'm for option three. He's alive and not in custody." He waited for a question, waited for Pearson to steer him in one direction or another. Therapy was like interrogation, and yet it wasn't. Sometimes he knew why Mac spoke up or remained silent. Sometimes he had no idea what Pearson's intent was. All he knew for sure was that he trusted him. Trusted him with his own life and that of the man he'd called Warden. The man born Norton Charpentier. The man who now apparently called himself Joseph McAfee.

Pearson asked no questions. "Of the other two," Aaron said at last, "I—I'm not sure. I think that I'd have to leave it up to him: _You want to be in custody, or die?_ And I don't know what his answer would be. Maybe—" He massaged his temple idly. "Maybe there are only two—no. Shit. No, there's only one option right now."

"Right now."

He nodded uncertainly. "I wasn't—I just realized that I want to talk to him." He looked up at Pearson, knowing his surprise showed on his face; not caring. "I don't even know how I could even work that out, but I think I want to talk to him. To find out—what's going on in his head. To find out what his expectations are." He worried at his temple harder, his fingers digging in against the skin and muscle. "To find out what_ my_ expectations are."

"What might make those expectations different from what you might feel toward a typical—" Pearson hesitated for an instant at the unfamiliar word. "—a typical UNSUB?"

Hotchner gazed out over the main parking lot. Three boys on skateboards careened crazily down the hill toward the hospital, dodging potholes almost casually as they did so.

_Someday Jack will do dumb stuff like that._

In the silence, he could hear footsteps in the hall, hear plastic tubing bouncing against metal IV poles, hear muffled coughing and someone laughing. The hospital was quieter on Saturday morning than during the week, he realized.

_Silence._

_I need to say something._

"It's a matter of focus," he said at last. "See, the Team, they're concentrating on the violence he did to me. He shocked me, he beat me up, he locked me away."

"I'm not sure how you're answering the question."

"I'm not sure I'm answering it. Maybe I'm answering a different question."

When Pearson said nothing, Hotchner continued. "He did those things. He injured me. He inflicted pain and terror and pure misery on me—but things changed, and by that, I don't mean my attitude. It was clear after a while that he knew he'd bitten off way more than he could chew, that his fantasy'd fallen far short of what he had in mind, what he'd dreamed.

"I've dealt with guys like this since I joined the Bureau. They have a fantasy, it doesn't work out, and they take out their anger on their victims. They up the abuse, they experiment with new ways to get the rush they'd been after. It's all about power, about mastery.

"Not Warden. His violence always stemmed from fear, from his knowledge that I was bigger and better trained and I'd already killed a man with my bare hands. You could see it in his eyes, that after a few weeks, he was frantic for a way to close it down, to let me go without destroying himself. Instead of upping the abuse, he showered new privileges on me, as if until he could figure out a way to disengage, the least he could do was to make my captivity less unpleasant. A guy like that—_he's not just salvageable, he's __already __been salvaged_.

"When he risked his own neck to get me out of there—when his last words weren't 'Help me!' but 'Up and to your right, and you'll find the road,' I just…I just think that if he's really out there—and I swear to God he was dead; he didn't move so much as an inch, and he fell hard—then there needs to be some kind of cosmic Reset button.

"My whole life is about putting away the people who are compelled to do terrible things. The chances this guy will ever do anything even remotely like this again are between slim and none. If someone else were the victim here, it'd be different, and that's why there's no point in trying to explain this to the Team. All their training and their motivation, it's to protect the innocent by putting the guilty away. And that's the way it should be.

"I'm the victim here, and victimhood comes with damn few privileges. But one privilege that a victim does have, and I intend to exercise it, is to give the truth as I see it so justice can be done. And that's the bottom line: I ruined this guy's life once by not speaking up, and I'll be damned if I'll ruin it again by giving him away. That's my justice. That's my satisfaction." He extended his left hand. "I have the power to trip that Reset button."

He sighed. "I'm not sure I answered the question," he said at last. "At least, not yours."

"Eh, you answered a question worth answering," Pearson said. "Maybe it's the question I should have asked. What are you doing now?"

"Nothing. Almost nothing. Trying to answer their questions honestly as—as things come back to me. I have most of it now. Trying to be as honest as I can, but—nudging them away from, from _him_, when they get too close."

"_'Him.'_"

Hotchner drew a long, shuddery breath. "Him. Warden."

"What kind of conversation do you envision having with him, if you can't even say his name to the one other person in the world who's committed to keeping it secret?"

Aaron studied the big, beefy man with his gruff face and his kind eyes for a long moment. "Norton Charpentier," he said at last, his own voice barely a whisper.

"Have you considered what you'll do when they ask you for a physical description?"

Hotchner watched an EMT vehicle pull away from the emergency entrance, its lights off and its siren silent. "They already did. I described my father."

"The obvious question here," Pearson said, faint amusement in his voice, "is—"

Aaron found that he was beginning to smile. "A guy I prosecuted once, he wound up flipping for us, he told us one day that the secret to a convincing false ID is to picture in your mind somebody that you already know, preferably dead or in prison, and to pick someone who, when you think of him, he triggers the same kind of emotion in you. So if you're describing someone who's supposed to scare you or turn you on, you pick someone from your past who scared you or turned you on."

"And your father?"

"He scared the living shit out of me."

"You said something a minute ago that intrigued me," Pearson said. "You said that your Team, your people, 'protect the innocent by putting away the guilty.'"

Hotchner nodded.

"I suppose that I expected you to say that they protect the innocent _and_ put away the guilty."

"But we don't," Aaron said. "I mean, the only way we protect the innocent is by putting away the bastards so they can't hurt anyone else. By the time we get the case, they've done their damage, usually to at least three people, already. We—the BAU—we're not a shield protecting the weak and vulnerable. We come into it, essentially, as society's avengers. We track down the UNSUB, the killer, the deviant, the rat bastard, and we turn him over to the courts with the best possible case evidence we can hand them. That's all we can do, and we do it pretty well, I believe. But the only people we can protect are the people who haven't already been destroyed by the UNSUBs."

"How do you feel about that?"

"It's an honorable calling. It's something that needs to be done. I enjoy doing it, and I know that I do it well. Did it well," he amended himself. "What if I'm fooling myself? What if I'm so damaged, so traumatized, that I can't do the job anymore?"

"If that were to happen, how would it alter your feelings about Warden?"

"Angry," he replied. "I'd be angry."

"Why?"

"Because he stole away an important part of me."

"Would you feel justified in misleading your colleagues and preventing their arrest of this man if—as a direct result of what he put you through—you lost your ability to do your job?"

"I don't know," Aaron said. "I think—I want to talk to him. I think if I talk to him, I'll have a better idea about what I do and don't want."

"Do you have any ideas yet on how to go about that?"

"No. But I think it'll help, having the Team in Eau Claire, having just JJ to deal with. I'll have a little maneuvering room."

A doctor was paged over the hospital PA system. Hotchner sat up, startled, realizing that he'd not been hearing the cliché "Doctor So-and-so, Doctor So-and-so," chant he associated with hospitals. "When did they stop paging doctors?" he asked.

"Remind me to add ADD to your diagnosis," said Pearson with a slight grin. "Since we all got so wired. Pagers, cell phones—the PA's almost extinct. Pity, I think. I spent a month in the hospital when I was in high school, amusing myself by listening to the pages and listing all the doctors' names. Trying to figure out from the room numbers and the kind of page what their specialties were and what was happening. Great fun."

_Remind me to add OCD to _your_ diagnosis_, Aaron thought.


	52. Saturday Afternoon Confessions

A/N: We're three chapters from the end here, but there are still a few things in store for you and our favorite agents! As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world.

Last call: While the ending for this story is set in stone, we're interested in what you want to see, what you're still curious about, potential loose ends. _Please feel free to PM starofoberon with your questions and feelings_ as this story races to its conclusion!

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Fifty-Two**

**Saturday Afternoon Confessions**

David Rossi was the last one back to Altoona, having swung by Hotch's room to explain to him about the new case. Sitting in a booth by the window of the Eat 'n' Park, Jennifer Jareau saw him climb out of the SUV and beep the locks. She wondered why he was coming here, to the restaurant, rather than heading back to the motel, where his go-bag was located.

_Or maybe he already checked out._ Rossi's slow, engaging grin hid fierce organization and a razor-sharp mind. Maybe his go-bag was already in the back of the SUV.

"Hey," he said, sliding into the seat across from her. He gave the server a don't-bother-I'm-just-here-for-a-minute wave of his hand and glanced quickly around. Nobody was seated close to them, but he bent forward and spoke very softly.

"I told Aaron," he said. "He was having another of those nightmares—Jayje, the man was terrified. And this is important, because it's all gonna be on you for the next few days. Listen, there's a couple things you need to know. The first one is this: Aaron has _always_ had those damn things."

"Nightmares?"

"Yeah. That's the main reason why, when we have to double up, we always bunk together. He's had nightmares for as long as he can remember, and some of the ones where he wakes up in the worst shape—sweating, whimpering—the thing he was afraid of seems stupid by the light of day. I know that Reid's really concerned about the content of Aaron's dreams, but you have to be aware that he's never been a peaceful sleeper. He has nightmares, he mumbles scary shit in his sleep. It isn't a sign that something's wrong. We all have our ways of dealing with the stuff we see. I drink. Morgan—Morgan makes a lot of women happy. And Aaron has nightmares. Just a heads-up: waking up just short of a scream isn't necessarily a sign that there's something wrong. OK?"

She was sorely tempted to say, _You also 'make a lot of women happy,' as you put it, Dave_, but this was neither the time nor the place for teasing.

"Got it," she said. "You're saying that there's no substantial difference between nightmares from Warden and regular nightmares?"

"None that I can see, other than that they're happening more frequently. They _may_ be, I mean."

"So—is there anything I should say or do? Should I comment? Should I ignore them?"

"My sense is that you should just ignore them unless maybe he's still troubled after he wakes up. Use your own judgment, JJ. I just wanted you to have the background information that nightmares seem to come with his territory."

"OK, thanks," she said. She wondered whether there would ever be an end to Hotch's loss of privacy. The legal system is the ultimate destroyer of the right to secrets. She knew that in some ways, victims lose more of their privacy than the UNSUBs do. If they're recovered alive, they have to live with the knowledge that there are strangers out there—people in law enforcement or the judicial system—who know more about their fears, their failures, their relationships and private hatreds, aspirations and their porn preferences, than even their most intimate friends and relatives. From long experience, she knew that the BAU often knew more about the victim than the victim did.

"Anything else?" she asked, less because she thought there might be anything left to say than as a way to conclude the conversation so Rossi and the rest of the Team could take off for Wisconsin.

Rossi contemplated the smiley-face cookies decorating the paper placemat before him for half a minute or more. "Just between us," he said finally, "and this can never go anywhere else. _Never._ Do you understand me?"

_Oh, shit. _

"Of course," she assured him.

Rossi glanced around the restaurant again and leaned in very close. "Foyet didn't just stab him—he raped him, too," he whispered. "There was—damage. Surgery. I've been assured by Dr. Marx that there's no evidence that Warden sexually assaulted him, but—if the issue comes up, you have to know that so you'll know what to ignore and what to follow up on."

"I understand," she said aloud. Internally, she was thinking, _And there goes even more of your privacy, Hotch. I am so freaking sorry about this._

Rossi left a few minutes later, after helping himself to one of the strawberries off her Belgian waffles and drinking most of her water.

Morgan, Prentiss, and Reid arrived shortly thereafter and asked the hostess to seat them in her booth. Prentiss climbed in first, followed by Morgan. Reid settled his skinny little buns in next to JJ. He seemed absorbed in texting; he barely raised his eyes to say, "Oh, g'morning, JJ."

"It's as done as it's gonna get," Morgan reported. "The locals have the description Aaron gave us of Warden. If and when his body shows up, then maybe we'll get an identification—DNA, fingerprints, whatever. But it's a distinct possibility that the body'll never surface. They have no reason to excavate most of the slide; any digging they do is gonna be concentrated on clearing roads."

"Whoever he was," Emily said, "he was smart and prepared. The bank account, the one that belonged to whatsisname, the sister's ex-husband, he's had it for more than twenty years, still has about thirty thousand in it. She's had no contact with Sinclair, that's his name, the second husband, since before she filed for divorce. The local office tried to get in to see him but he isn't talking. He's all lawyered up, _won't talk to nobody about nuttin'_, you know the drill. Lawyer says there's no reason Sinclair would have any interest in defending or avenging the late Norton Charpentier. There's a forensic accountant looking at the situation, they're in the process of getting all the warrants they need."

"It's possible that Warden faked it himself," said Reid. "We were talking about why Warden would choose the conviction of Norton Charpentier as something worth avenging, we even talked about, well, maybe he knew Charpentier. It's more likely that he identified strongly with Charpentier—there's a case to be made that Warden himself was an accountant."

"Have we completely eliminated the idea that Warden _was_ Charpentier?" JJ asked.

"Pretty much," Morgan said. "He was huge, a basketball of a guy with ears that stuck out like, like—"

"Obama's," said Emily. "Or Prince Charles. Or—whozit, the guy who does the commercials for Farmers Insurance."

"Or Ross Perot," Reid said.

"And the chewed money belt and wallet would tend to indicate that he's gone—or he's some kind of super-genius," Morgan said.

"In the name of accuracy," Reid said, his attention still focused on his smartphone, "Norton Charpentier _was_ technically a genius, IQ of 160, blew through his pretty demanding private school in ten years, entered college at sixteen, completed his MBA at twenty-two." At last he looked up and smiled at his teammates at the table. "But Garcia's tracked all of Charpentier's passions—the Baltimore Orioles, Republican politics, model railroading, Irish folk music—just in case he's actually out there. And if he is, he changed his name, his appearance, and his interests, and kept them changed. That's a degree of determination you just don't see for twelve years."

"Charpentier's life insurance paid off in '03," Emily Prentiss said. "And his estate was broken down the same way as the insurance, less a few charitable bequests. Twenty-five grand to Theresa Cable, 'in appreciation of our childhood closeness.' Everything else, by then almost half a million, went into a trust for Theresa's daughter, Melissa Ryerson, upon her twenty-first birthday, which occurred two years later."

"So we're operating on the assumption that this guy identified with Charpentier, that he was probably an accountant, and he's probably young enough that Hotch would be at most his fourth victim," Reid finished.

"There've been eight current and former federal prosecutors dropping out of sight over the last twenty years," said Morgan. "None of them's come back with tales of being held captive, which indicates that if any of them crossed paths with Warden, he killed them when he was done with them—or he drove them to suicide, one or the other. None of them has an open case anywhere—most of these disappearances have been written off as voluntary, dodging financial, marital, or ethical problems. Or some combination thereof."

"Remind you of anyone?" Rossi asked drily. "That's what Guffey hoped we'd all think."

"How much of this can I share with Hotch?" JJ asked.

Morgan shook his head dismissively. "Any of it. All of it. He has a right to know where we are on the investigation." He gave a grim half-smile. "Maybe it'll compensate for us not going full-out, balls-to-the-wall to nail Warden's identity anymore."

"Garcia gave me a flash drive full of data, pretty much everything she dug up on anyone, no matter how peripheral he or she was to the investigation," JJ told them. "I figure that at the least, it'll give me something concrete to do while Hotch's working on getting better." She gave that a little thought. "If he shows any interest in it, can I get him reviewing some of this stuff?"

"Sure," Morgan said. "Only, if he takes too much interest, you'll know to pull the plug, right?"

She snorted. "Of course."

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the words _licking your thigh_ on the screen of Spencer Reid's smartphone. She forced herself to give a bright, perky, on-top-of-it smile to Emily and Derek.

_Wow. Now there's someplace else I definitely don't want to go._

**~ o ~**

The man whose health insurance identified him as Joseph McAfee shoved one pillow under his right knee and balanced another across his lap. He found the tray table unmanageable for using his laptop. The knee-and-pillows strategy seemed to work better. He needed everything to be as comfortable as possible, because he was engaged in what might well be the most important task in his life since the day he'd been convicted: He was composing his legal confession. His spiritual confession would occur later in the evening, when the visiting priest made hospital rounds.

Being above all else a meticulous man, intelligent, observant, and orderly, he'd constructed an outline before he began the project, although he wasn't necessarily filling in the sections in either chronological or outline order. He was tired and sore and he had only an hour before visiting hours—it still blew his mind that Joe McAfee was popular; Norton Charpentier surely had never been so—and he anticipated an arrest by the close of the weekend, or Monday at the latest. He knew that prosecutors expected detailed confessions before they negotiated guilty pleas, and he intended to be prepared.

_And what on earth is the holdup? He's awake, he's lucid, he's surrounded by members of his group._ Maybe, he decided, because Hotchner was himself a meticulous man, an orderly man, he was waiting until every legal I was dotted, every T crossed.

A pity that Norton had been so motivated by anger, by resentment. He wondered now—now that it was too late—what might have happened if he'd simply approached Aaron Hotchner calmly, face to face. If, instead of seizing the opportunity before him, he'd climbed out of his truck and said, "Can I have a few minutes of your time?" Given that Hotchner was at home and expecting his son, he might have been asked to come back at some other, more convenient time, but he wouldn't have been blown off completely, of that Norton was now sure.

He knew now that Hotchner was honorable, that knowledge of his error, once he'd become aware of it, had devastated him. Maybe at some point they could have come to a satisfactory conclusion. Hotchner was sharp, witty, with an inquisitive mind. He played a hell of a game of cribbage.

They could even have become friends. But, oh, no, the man who'd been Norton Charpentier, the man who generally studied every situation for alternatives, had failed to recognize that he was stuck in vengeance mode. He would spend the rest of his life in prison, and it would be, face it, only fair, because he'd struck out like a petulant child rather than managing his anger like a man.

He'd saved up all of his resentments, against the courts, against Bart McGraw, against most of the creeps who'd abused and terrified him in prison, all of them, and taken them all out on Hotchner. On Van der Weese, too. He'd been _exactly_ like—_man up and face it, chump_—Waldo Charpentier, who'd taken it all out on Nortie, the Fat Boy Who'll Never Be Sebastian. Which, of course, had been the greatest of Norton's sins: He was not, and never could be, the bright, charismatic firstborn son who'd succumbed to leukemia at the age of six, while Norton and his sister were still in the womb.

As he tapped the cursor downward through_ Section V, Abduction; C, Methods of Control, ii, Threats_, there was a tap on his door. He glanced up and was dismayed to see Parton, the pimpled transportation aide, shoving a wheelchair.

"Morning, Doc," the boy said with a big grin. "Time for your PT."

"I'm not a PhD," he said. "'Joe' or 'Mr. McAfee' will do fine. They have therapy here on weekends?"

"Sure thang," said Parton. "Close that down and saddle up, man. Let's go kick some butt."

He password-protected the file as he closed it, shut the laptop, and prepared to swing his leg free of the bed.

_Physical therapy again. On a weekend, no less._

The priests at St. Benedict's Academy had told him and his classmates, when they were injured, ill, or bullied, to "offer up your pain in expiation for your own sins and for the poor souls in Purgatory."

Norton Charpentier, world's fattest valedictorian, Class of 1976, offered up today's miseries for his own sins, many and black as they might be. As they were. _Screw the poor souls in Purgatory. _

**~ o ~**

Aaron Hotchner sat in the high-backed chair beside the window. He'd caved in to Jessica's pleas and was playing the contents of his MP3 player through the tinny little speakers of his laptop, which added a whole new level of surrealism to his recovery. JJ and Jack played Go Fish on his hospital bed; Sean and Jessica—he looked up twice to assure himself that he really was watching Haley's sister and his brother dancing, discreetly, to Aerosmith's "The Other Side."

Everyone was having a great time.

Good.

The flashdrive that Garcia had given JJ sat there on its purple-cow keychain, hanging out of JJ's bag. He'd heard her talking to Garcia about it.

He bent slowly, carefully, not wanting to rush, but at the same time, not prepared to explain himself if JJ looked up or the song shifted to something that Sean considered undanceable. With his left hand he kept a firm grip on his laptop; with his right, he reached for the drive. _Just...one...more...inch—got it!_

He straightened as slowly, as smoothly as he'd bent over, and shoved the flashdrive into another USB port. _Yup,_ he thought at his screen as the laptop looked it over. _Copy that sucker—every single bit and byte. _

Aerosmith faded away. Jessica and Sean backed away from each other, smiling a little self-consciously. Fortunately, within a few seconds David Lee Roth was wailing that he was "Just a Gigolo," and _So You Think You Can Dance, St. Vincent's Central Edition_, continued pretty much uninterrupted.

God, there were almost six gigs of crap on the flashdrive! He gritted his teeth at his screen, sending it little hurry-up vibes and giving it his best Aaron-fucking-Hotchner glare, which had no apparent effect on the file transfer.

_Oh, my God. _Tommy Roe singing "Dizzy." He freaking hated that song, hated bubblegum rock with a white-hot passion, but the newly minted Boogie Queen and her consort warbled along to it happily. Even JJ joined in, although Jack, clearly his father's son, wrinkled his nose.

_That's my boy._

He wished he weren't getting flashbacks to his hours in the exercise cage. These were the same songs—though some of them were new; he was pretty sure he'd never heard the Katy Perry one before—oh, holy shit, "The Stripper" suddenly was throbbing out of his laptop.

He gazed with horror for a few seconds at Sean and Jessica, both of them acting about as inappropriate as you can get with your clothes on, then realized that the song was short and it at least had the benefit of engaging JJ and Jack's attention as well.

While all four of his guests were still applauding and laughing, he ejected the flashdrive and dropped it back into JJ's purse.

_Who says I can't do covert shit? Take that, Morgan! _

Now as soon as he could credibly send his guests over to the Downtown Diner for ice cream sundaes, he'd be in a position where he could start doing some serious data retrieval.

**~ o ~**

He was down to _Section III, Preparation; B, The Bunker; iii, Discovery._

_When I helped the Hawthornes clear the junk from the upper area of the stable,_ he tapped out on the keys of his laptop, _I found an old wire-bound steno pad. On its cover, someone had printed in permanent red marker, "Annals of the Shield, Vol. The 6__th__." It had belonged to John Clement Laughler, a high official of the Shield of Yahweh. In between rants about Jews ["juwes"] and Negroes ["mud men"] he described the bunker they were constructing on the site of an old mine and cave. He described in detail their leader's obsession with the notion of __being trapped forever in a metal box…._

There was a tap at his door. He looked up to see a muscular, very black man clad in black trousers and shirt and a Roman collar. "Good afternoon, I am Father Edouard Chedjou," he said, in soft musical accents that hinted of Africa and France. "You are Joseph McAfee?"

"I am."

Chedjou checked a small card again. "You requested a priest?"

"Yes, I did. Come in, Father. You said Chedjou? Are you from Cameroon?" McAfee hazarded, based on the French notes in his accent.

"It's a good guess," said Fr. Chedjou with a broad and dazzling smile. "Spot on. Yes, I am from Cameroon."

A few minutes later, after the transportation aide (not Parton this time) had pushed McAfee down to a vacant counseling room, Chedjou unfolded a satin stole and draped it around his shoulders.

It would have been easier in the anonymity of a confessional, but face-to-face confession had been common since long before he'd ceased to be Norton Charpentier. Besides, hospitals, even Catholic ones, don't usually have confessional booths, and there was nothing stopping him from facing away from Fr. Chedjou. He chose instead to face the priest squarely, with his left leg angling off stiffly to the side on its raised support.

_The confessional is no place for excuses, for mitigating circumstances,_ he reminded himself as he organized his thoughts. _Keep it focused on your sins, not on the unfairness of life. Fr. Chedjou knows all about the unfairness of life—and black as your sins might be, Chedjou has heard worse._

It was like leaping from a plane and trusting to a parachute packed by a stranger.

_One. Two. Three. Get on with it!_

"Bless me, Father," he forced himself to say, trying to keep his voice steady, "for I have sinned. My last confession was about eight years ago. I've drifted from the structure of the Church, but not that much from its spiritual center. These are my sins."

Father Chedjou sat motionless, his broad black hands curled over his knees. "Eight years is a long time, Joseph."

"Yes."

"What kept you from the Church?"

He bit his lip. "Anger, Father. Hatred."

"At the Church?"

"No, Father. At life. I say this as background, not as justification: I was falsely accused of sex crimes, convicted, and imprisoned. I lost my reputation and my livelihood. While I was in prison, my wife and daughter were killed in an auto accident. I attended their funeral cuffed hand and foot, with belly chains and two armed guards.

"After five years, I got my freedom back, my record expunged. The courts compensated me with money for the loss of my time, my family, and my reputation.

"It was nothing. It was—just money." He looked down at his own hands, so small and pale in comparison to Fr. Chedjou's. "I lived to get revenge on the lawyers who'd held back evidence that would have proved my innocence. There was something—_obscene_ about sitting in a pew on Sunday morning, singing about God's love, and burning with hatred."

He half expected Chedjou to say something, to moralize about the power of God's love, but the man just sat there quietly.

"As I said, Father, that isn't justification. It's an explanation of how I got so separated from the Church. My sin—I have many sins, but there's one, um, overarching sin, collection of sins, that I need to confess.

"I tracked down the attorney who'd admitted to the courts that he'd withheld exculpatory evidence. I took him prisoner, intending to hold him for five years, the same period of time that I'd been in prison. He was an older man, not in good health. He became frightened, confessed to me that he'd been covering for a younger attorney on his staff. He had a heart attack right there in the car with me. I tried to save him, but—I failed. So I have his death on my conscience. Through my actions, I murdered that man."

"How long ago was that?" Chedjou asked.

"That was April of '08, so—a little over two years ago."

"And what compels you now to confess your sin?"

He almost literally writhed in his embarrassment. "Because it wasn't enough," he confessed softly. "I went after the younger lawyer then. I was determined that somebody was going to suffer for five years for what I'd gone through. I tracked down the younger attorney and took him prisoner, took him from his family and held him captive for four months. When he was disrespectful or uncooperative, I punished him. I took away his food, his light, his privileges. Sometimes I shocked him with a cattle prod."

Recognition shone in the priest's eyes—_he must watch the news_—but all he said was, "And what effect did this have on your anger and resentment? Your hatred?"

The Norton Charpentier inside of Joe McAfee squared his shoulders and manned up. "It did nothing for my hatred," he confessed. "It only redirected it inward. All my anger, all of my resentment, it was for nothing. At first, I could actually feel the evil in the man, but—he wasn't evil at all, just some guy who was doing the best he could, who'd made an error and didn't even realize what the result had been. So I suppose—" He drew a long, painful breath. "I suppose it was my own evil I was sensing. Or maybe some, oh, global evil that Man is capable of committing."

_This must sound like horseshit to Fr. Chedjou. I need to shut up._

"You let him go."

"I had to. The place where I was holding him was flooding. If I didn't get him out of there, he would drown. I already had one lawyer's life on my conscience. I didn't want a second."

He sighed explosively. _I sound like Prisoner when he was frustrated and under stress. Fancy that!_ "And those are the big ones—the abductions, all the, ah, collateral sins that came with their commission."

Fr. Chedjou sat very still for another few seconds, then he said, "Joseph, you know that there is no sin that your Father in Heaven cannot and will not forgive for a contrite heart and a broken spirit, do you not?"

"Yes, Father."

"Do you also understand that true contrition must involve facing the injury you have done to these men, to their loved ones, and to society by breaking society's laws?"

Norton was a little insulted by that one. Who did this guy think he was? He'd considered the seminary, for pete's sake! He knew his theology, his dogma and doctrine, as thoroughly as he had back in the days when he aced all his religion exams.

_Humility. A humbled spirit is one that is on the path to true repentance._

"I wasn't looking for a free pass, Father," he replied. "Soon, probably by Sunday night, I'll be arrested. I don't intend to resist arrest. I'm prepared to plead guilty, and I'm composing a full and formal legal confession."

_But there's something hard and black and cold sitting in my chest, something as solid and as unforgiving as one of the cannonballs I loaded into my Civil War 'fifty-seven cannon, and it's growing every minute of every day. I want to be free of it before it chokes me to death._

"Let us look again at the lawyer that you held prisoner," said Fr. Chedjou. "Let us look at the injustice he committed toward you and your family. This thing he did, it was criminal?"

"Yes. I mean, the courts admonished his boss, the man who covered for him. If you mean, did he do it deliberately to convict me, then, no. He thought it didn't matter because I was obviously guilty in his eyes. It was selfish and careless. It might have been minor, but it had terrible consequences for me."

"So what he did was wrong, he knew it was wrong, and of his own free will he did it anyway?"

_The classic definition of sin. Unlike the courtroom, ignorance of the law was an excuse before God, who knew your heart and couldn't be bamboozled. Any component missing from that chain, and it wasn't a sin._

"Yes, Father."

"So, Joseph—" Chedjou leaned forward urgently. "Have you forgiven him for his sin against you and your family?"

Norton Charpentier burst into tears, nodding wordlessly as sobs tore through him.

He scarcely recalled Chedjou's admonitions about God's promises and about the nature of forgiveness. When he choked out the Act of Contrition—the very words he'd commanded his prisoner to write out repeatedly when he first arrived—he was aware of the ugly irony, but he forced himself to get through the recitation.

The priest gave him an assignment of prayer and fasting, then said, "While your Father in Heaven forgives you, you have work here on Earth to do, too. You will never be free of this sin until you reach out to the man you tortured. It can be in person or in a letter, a real letter—no email, no voicemail, no texting, no post on his Facebook or Twitter—but you need to tell your victim that you know you did him wrong and you are truly sorry."

_Useless irrelevant thought: Did he just tell me not to post an apology on Facebook? So much for those who say the Church is behind the times._

"Yes, Father," he murmured.

Chedjou reminded him again of the healing power of repentance and forgiveness, of Christ's command to His church to forgive sinners in His name, then spoke the words that priests had spoken down through the centuries, forgiving him his sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

"Go in peace, Joseph," the priest said, "to love and serve the Lord and your fellow man with gladness of heart and singleness of purpose."


	53. Saturday Night Fervor

A/N: We're just two chapters from the end here. As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world we dreamed up.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Fifty-Three**

**Saturday Night Fervor**

The Hotchner guys were, face it, cute as three bugs, hunched over intently as they played a game of War on Aaron's bed. Jack sat at the head of the bed, his back braced against his daddy's pillows. Aaron sat at the foot, his left leg cocked up on the bed, his right leg on the floor. Sean had one of the small guest chairs pulled over between the two beds. JJ thought she'd seen WWE matches played with less attitude and determination. One thing was for sure, and that was that the game wasn't going well for Hotch. He was down to about three cards, and his son was on a roll.

A few minutes and a lot of laughter later, it was all over, at least for Aaron. As Sean took the last of his cards, Aaron said, "Well, that's it for me. Jack, I'm counting on you to beat your Uncle Sean for me."

Jack's eyes were like cerulean saucers, just huge. Scarcely breathing, he gasped, "I beat you, Daddy?"

Hotchner chuckled. "You sure did, Buddy. Good card playing!"

There was a quick, unmistakably significant glance from Sean, and although no words were spoken, JJ realized two things: Aaron and Sean's father had never been able to lose to his children, and up until that moment, Aaron had been much the same. JJ was neither shocked not surprised by this; she'd known several families where the father had to win at everything. In most of them, the dad seemed to feel that his kids would lose their confidence in him if they thought he could be bested. In a couple of them, it seemed to be nothing but parental ego.

She'd heard Jack on more than one occasion say, "Nobody beats Daddy!" as a point of pride, so she presumed that Aaron had been among those who wanted their children confident that they'd always be protected.

The game progressed, one on one now, but it didn't last long. Sean also held very few cards, and in a matter of minutes, Jack took his last card too.

"I won! I won!" Jack crowed, flinging his arms up in the air. "I get to be the Tickle Monster!" As Sean collected the cards and returned them to their box, Jack threw himself across the bed at his father with all the intensity of a linebacker bringing down the quarterback. "Tickle Monster!" he shrieked, and father and son rolled around at the foot of the bed, both laughing.

Hotch's laughter had to be forced; in a youth financed primarily by babysitting JJ had yet to meet a small child who knew how to tickle. They just dug their little fingers into your torso and you faked an appreciative squeal. She'd seen Aaron Hotchner's torso just three days ago, and she knew it to be a mass of bruises and rope burns.

Sure enough, he'd already pried his son's fingers out of his ribs. Now he lay flat on his back across the foot of the bed, repeatedly lifting the boy high in the air as they counted. When Jack got to "twenty-ten, twenty-'leven," Aaron stopped.

"Nope, nope," he gasped. "Twenty-nine, _thirty_. Like three-ty, Buddy, OK? We'll try it again in a little bit. See if you can remember that."

"'K," the boy said. "Cause you gotsa have your exercise."

"I do," his father assured him. "I'll do more Jack-lifts later, Buddy."

**~ o ~**

Shortly after 4:00 in the afternoon, Ted Hawthorne aimed the Fusion sedan into a slot at the back of the hospital's main parking lot. "Tell me again," he said nervously, "exactly what he said on the phone."

Bren gazed out the fly-specked windshield at the battered van in front of them. "I don't think this is a set-up to arrest us," she said. "He asked whether we could drop by the hospital this afternoon or evening. He said that there would be other people there, but he would prefer that we don't tell them that he'd invited us."

"That seems odd," said Ted. "Why would an FBI agent want us to mislead other FBI agents?"

Bren drew a long breath. The truth was that the notion troubled her, as well. On the other hand, no matter how often she gamed it, she saw no profit in withholding that information from the other agents. "I don't know," she said at last, "but he sounded friendly and straight-forward, Teddy. I think it's going to be OK."

'Your gut?" OK, maybe a little snarky of him.

"Look, he didn't _order_ us not to tell anyone else; he just asked. Seems to me if this was some grand scheme to hold us accountable for—for—" She found that she still couldn't say it; she was still staggered by the alleged Joe McAfee's second life, his long-term mistreatment of the agent right there under their noses, staying in their spare room over the stable, breaking bread with them at least twice a week. "For everything," she concluded lamely.

"If?"

"Huh?"

"You started an _if_ statement there," Mr. Logical reminded her. "Then you fell all over yourself trying to avoid mentioning the McAfee problem."

"I did?" She thought about that. "I did. Right. I—I'm not sure what I was going to say, but if he was trying to trick us into admitting something, wouldn't he insist that we not mention it, or maybe arrange to meet us when—"

She thought again. "I'm really not sure where I was going with that, Teddy. Let's just go with 'gut,' OK?"

Her husband snickered as they entered the glass double doors of the hospital. Sometimes she really hated it when he was right. He leaned over the desk and beamed at the receptionist. "Hi, Paula," he said. "We're here to see Mr. Hotchner in four-thirty."

"Go on up," she said with a chirpy smile. "He said you'd be coming."

"Do you think we should pick up something at the gift shop?" Brenda asked. "I hate coming empty-handed to visiting people."

"We were invited," Ted said. "It's our presence he wants, not another planter or stuffed toy or balloon."

She had no answer for that one. They rode the elevator to the fourth floor in silence, and remained silent as they walked down the hall.

Through the open door she could see the agent still had no roommate—the bed closer to the door still held no patient—but the room was a bit crowded. Two attractive blonde women, one with straight hair, one with a mad halo of curls, a young man, and a small boy filled the space around Aaron Hotchner, who sat on the bed but was fully dressed in jeans and a bright red shirt. The IV line was gone, she noticed.

Before Ted's knuckles could make contact with the door, the younger of the blonde women, the one with long straight hair and huge hoop earrings, saw their approach and stood up with an expectant look on her face. Hotchner caught the movement and looked toward the door as well. With some effort, he rose to his feet, ignoring the cane that was right beside him, and took two unsteady steps toward them.

"Doctor Hawthorne," he said, extending his hand toward Bren. "And Doctor Hawthorne. So nice to see you again."

"Bren, please," she protested. "It's good to see you up and active, Agent Hotchner."

"Aaron, please," he replied with a smile as broad as it was professional. He indicated the blonde with the straight hair and hoop earrings. "This is Agent Jennifer Jareau, and that's my sister-in-law Jessica Brooks. My brother Sean Hotchner." His smile morphed to pure sunshine. "And my son Jack. These people are Ted and Brenda Hawthorne—they found me and took me into town."

The small boy popped to his feet and held out a hand. "How do you do?" he asked each of them solemnly. "Thank you for finding my daddy."

"Pleasure," Hotchner's brother said, rising slightly from his chair and resuming his seat.

"Hi," his sister-in-law said. Brooks, he'd said her name was. _Must have retained her maiden name. Or maybe not; she looks much older._

"Nice to meet you," Agent Jareau said. "I heard all about you, of course. You live up on Blue Bauman, right?"

_OK, here we go_, Bren thought, but all she said was, "Yes."

_The little boy is just beyond cute though. He was born to break hearts._

Hotchner glanced around the hospital room. "I think, maybe," he began hesitantly, "it might be good if you took Jack down to play on the swings for a bit," he said to Agent Jareau. "We have some boring grownup stuff to talk about," he said to the child. He sat back down on the bed and the boy promptly flung his arms around his father.

"We'll be back soon," the boy assured his father. "We won't be gone too long."

"I know," Hotchner said, and planted a kiss on his son's forehead. "You keep Uncle Sean in line, you hear?"

"Yeah, I will," said Jack. "I gots muscles and brains."

"You certainly do," his father sighed, his pride shining all over his face. "We won't be long. I'll call Ms. Jareau's cellphone when we're done, OK?"

Once his other guests were gone, Hotchner gestured toward the chairs beside the window. Ted took the high-backed chair, the one with the arms. Brenda took the smaller of the two, keeping her eyes on Hotchner.

Whatever was going on, he didn't want his sister-in-law, his brother, his little boy, or the other agent to hear it. Hotchner sat down on the edge of the bed with his hands braced on either side of him as though he might lunge off the mattress and launch an attack—or fling himself through the window—at any second.

"Joseph McAfee," he said. "That's his name, isn't it?"

"Yes," Ted said. His voice was tense, tight, but—typical Ted, it didn't occur to him to say anything else.

"We had no prior knowledge of what happened to you," Brenda said. "Joe called us when he fell, when he broke his leg. He told us to go find you before you died of hypothermia. That was the first we knew about any of this."

The FBI agent's brow furrowed. "He had a phone?"

"Not on his person," Ted replied. "There was no connectivity in the cavern. It was in his car, in the parking lot of—about half a mile from where he fell."

"Why did he call you?"

"He's my friend," Ted said, without apology. "I've known him since—well, we thought he'd just come here from Canada. Since '02. And we live on Blue Bauman."

"How'd you get Derek Morgan's number?"

"Whose?"

"The phone number I'm supposed to have given you," Hotchner said. "I know you didn't get it from me—"

God alone knew what compelled Ted to tough it out, but his first response was, "Of course you did, you—"

"I don't _know_ Morgan's number," Hotchner insisted, his voice still low. "It's programmed into my phone, but I've never had a reason to memorize it."

Ted sighed and explained about the letter Joe—Norton—had left in his care, about how Joe'd called him and described the general area, how he'd begged Ted to find the agent and bring him to safety.

"He's told us all about it now," Brenda said. "We visited him in the hospital—"

"Which hospital?" The agent's eyes were sharp, alert, missing nothing. She decided that if she were in some interrogation room with him, she'd probably tell him everything he wanted to know.

Then she recalled the shivering, confused, half-naked creature who'd gotten himself hung up on a protruding root on Tuesday night. It was hard to believe that they were the same man, but, yes, the deep cut over the left eye, the bright hairless patches on his otherwise densely hairy wrists—this was the same guy.

"Nittany St. Luke's, in State College," she said. "He told us all about it, about being—about being someone named Norton Charpentier. About prison, about losing his family, and about holding you responsible. About how, all the time he was visiting us, he was keeping you down in the cavern. The bunker. About the flood—"

"How is he?" Hotchner interrupted.

"He's—he's recovering," Brenda said. "He had to have surgery on his one leg, it was broken in I think he said six places. He has pins and splints in it now. He fractured his skull and some ribs."

"In the fall," the agent said, his voice unexpectedly soft.

"Yes, sir," she said. "And he knows—we all know—that he's going to be arrested—"

"How did he get to his car with all that damage?"

Before she could reply, Ted said, "He crawled."

Amazingly, the agent winced. "When did he do that?"

"He isn't sure how long he was unconscious," said Brenda. "But when he did wake up, he called to you and you didn't answer. He didn't know whether you'd moved on, or whether you were unconscious, too."

"Tell me what kind of man he is," the agent broke in. "Or what kind of man you thought he was before he told you what he'd done."

"Joe was one of my best friends," Ted said. "Smart, thoughtful. Passionate about Puccini and Verdi. Hard-working. He trains therapy dogs and horses. Tutors kids on both ends, the bright and the failing. Devoted to Civil War history—we've been in the same reenactment group for, what is it, honey? Six years?"

"Almost seven," Brenda said. "This is all—it's like a bad dream. If there was one man in the world I'd trust with our house, our money, our lives, our anything, it would have been Joe. I trusted him more than—this is really embarrassing. But this is the important part," she added hastily. "He knows what he did and he's—"

"He isn't going anywhere," Ted said. "When your guys go to arrest him, he'll be—I think that he's at peace with it. He's kind of wondering what the holdup is, though."

Bren turned and stared at her husband.

"Well, he is," Ted said, his tone defensive. "He's getting impatient waiting for that shoe to drop—"

"Listen to me," Hotchner said, his voice low and controlled. "I haven't identified him to the Bureau yet. To anyone." He glanced around behind him as if ensuring that his family hadn't returned. "I want to see him. To talk to him. I can get a pass out of here, no problem, but the problem's getting free of my—my entourage. If I can, can you take me to see him?"

Brenda frowned. "When?"

The agent shrugged. "Tonight. Tomorrow. I don't know. I don't even know if I can swing it, but I want to try."

"It's a seventy minute drive," said Ted.

Hotchner nodded. "Then tomorrow." He looked at Ted, at Bren, and back to Ted. "Please? If gas is a prob—"

"Don't be silly," Ted said gruffly. "I was going to ask you about going out anyway."

Startled, Bren stared at her husband.

"Was thinking maybe if you could get yourself an off-base pass, I could show you where we found you, where the cavern was located." Ted looked up at the door quickly and his voice dropped. "Show you where Joe fell, maybe. You could even bring your, your entourage. We have horses, a couple dogs, I bet we could find that little boy something to do, too. We're no more than twenty minutes from the front door here."

_Would have been nice if you'd told me about your plans, turkey_, she thought at her husband, but she said nothing.

"We do that tonight, maybe your entourage'll be a little more likely to trust you on your own tomorrow," Ted continued. "What d'ya think?"

**~ o ~**

"Mr. McAfee?" a disbelieving voice called from behind him.

His colleague and friend Genie, who walked along beside him slowly, providing companionship and encouragement as he crutched his way back to his room, looked over her shoulder. "It's the other Brian," she whispered. "The one from Randall's department—the one who looks like an emo otter."

McAfee, who'd had about all the youthful enthusiasm he could handle for the weekend, made a slow and careful three-point turn in the hospital corridor. "Yes, Brian," he said, trying for tired but civil. The _civil_ part was a stretch. "It's me."

The boy looked him over, taking in the swollen and blackened eyes, the facial sutures and bruises, and above all, the rigid left leg. "Wow," he said finally, and the weight of the word made it clear how inadequate it was. "I saw your car, and—you know, it doesn't really look all that bad, but you look like—wow. _So_ not good."

"Yes," McAfee said with a weary sigh. "Consider it the flip side of those dreadful wrecks where everyone walks away with minor injuries."

The boy nodded. "Sure, yeah, I guess so," he said.

"Where'd you see my car? Strong's?"

"Yeah, I live over that way."

It was McAfee's turn to nod. "Good for you. Could I trouble you to continue to my room so I can get back there and off my feet? My foot," he corrected himself, since the folks in PT had warned him repeatedly not to let his left foot touch the floor. "It's the third door down on your right. Keep quiet; my new roomie just came up from surgery a couple hours ago."

"Yeah, sure, sorry," the boy blurted. "I'll, ah, I'll be waiting for you."

"Good lad." McAfee continued to stand there for a few seconds, watching his student make his way down to the correct room. Then he sighed deeply, refreshed his grip on the miserable crutches, and forced himself to close those last thirty feet or so to the comfort of his bed and his moaning, semi-conscious roommate.

_And Brian does look like an 'emo otter,'_ he thought, and the chuckle he was unable to repress loosened his muscles and made the journey easier.

"What's so funny?" Genie asked.

"Life," he replied. Any warm fuzzies he'd been feeling vanished as he realized that very soon she would learn that he was a murderer and a—what would they call him? A maniac? A mad professor? Of all the women that he occasionally dated and (less occasionally) bedded, Genie was the one he felt closest to loving. Physically nothing like his Diana, nevertheless she shared his late wife's gift for seeing through the bullshit and expressing herself with acerbic wit. She was young, too—just thirty-two, far too young for the alleged Joe McAfee with his sixty-year-old's ID and his forty-nine year old's body and libido.

_Stop it, Nortie. It's over. You no longer have any life. Not Norton Charpentier's, and certainly not Joseph McAfee's._

_On the minus side, jail will have no on-demand morphine drip, no endless Vicodin. On the plus side, nobody'll make you crutch your way up and down the goddamned halls over and over again._

"Get a wiggle on, Joe," Genie said, and nudged him gently. "I'll walk behind you and watch your cute little ol' butt."

And that was the instant when he realized what he had to do. It had always been among his available choices, and the preparation for it was remarkably similar to preparation for going to jail.

The relief of certainty flooded over him with a clarity, an intensity, almost akin to an orgasm. _Settle your affairs and end it already._

"You're right," he said in a mild voice. He gritted his teeth, took a slow, painful breath, and tightened his grip on his crutches.

"Genie, hon," he panted as pain lanced through his damaged ribs, "can you bring me my sleeping pills from the apartment? The crap they give me here makes me wake up feeling all hung over, and they don't want to change it. The sooner they're here, the sooner I can get a decent night's sleep."

"I don't know," Genie temporized. "It's only three more days till you get out of here, right?"

_Don't argue with her; it'll make it seem like a far bigger deal than it is._

"I suppose you're right. Still, I've already told them I won't take any more of the sleep stuff they're giving me. It's OK, it's all PRN anyway. But I'm tired of waking up with my head full of cotton."

She made sympathetic noises. "How much of that's the concussion? You do have a busted skull, Joey—remember? You can't expect everything in there to be bopping along like nothing happened."

But that's what you love about her—she's sharp and she speaks her mind.

"Then why do I think perfectly clearly after I've been awake for an hour or so?"

"There's your solution," she said with a giggle. "Wake up an hour earlier."

He sighed. It was critical that he do it now; it'd be impossible once he was in police custody.

_I can't exactly get myself shot while fleeing, can I? _

"I can bring them tomorrow," she said finally. "I'm locked into taking the kids to Molly and Stoney's concert tonight. Will that work?"

He nodded, trying to look casual without looking as if it didn't matter, after he'd just gone to such an effort to explain that it did. "That'd help, yeah. Thanks, Genie."

He renewed his grip on the crutch handles. As he proceeded down the hallway he hummed the thumping percussive triplets Wagner had written for the entrance down into Nibelheim, _bum-bada bum-bada, bomp-bomp-bomp, bum-bada, bum-bada, bomp-bomp-bomp_, like the grim and trapped little cripple he felt like—hell, he _was_—at the moment.

**~ o ~**

When he was an undergraduate, while Haley was still finishing high school, she'd sent him a goofy greeting card that said, "We have a weird and wonderful relationship: You're weird and I'm wonderful." That summed up with fair elegance the sensations he was feeling right now, in the front seat of the Hawthornes' sedan with Ted at the wheel, Bren in the back seat, and some opera or other playing softly on their sound system. His so-called entourage, in JJ's Bureau SUV, trailed along behind them. His window was down and the glorious sunshine and warm breezes poured over him. It was wonderful—he suddenly understood why dogs poked their heads out the window and let their ears and tongues flap in the wind—and it was weird.

He'd signed four separate liability forms, but the key to his getting sprung for the hours of 5:00 to 9:00 PM was the strongly worded order from Mac Pearson, who'd been more than happy to accede to Aaron's request for unlimited passes out of the hospital. They'd removed the port from his right hand, but he still wore the hospital bracelet around his left wrist. Still, for these brief four hours, he no longer felt like a patient.

_I haven't been in a car since Warden._

_No, wait._

"Is this the car you brought me into town in?" he asked.

"Is indeed," Ted drawled. "Bren was at the wheel and you and I were in the back. You were wrapped up in three blankets." Before Hotchner could think of anything to say to that, the man added, "And you were fairly pitiful, son, if you don't mind my saying so." Ted glanced at him as if fearing that he'd offended him.

"I don't—I don't recall _anything_ about it," Aaron said. "After Wa—after he fell, I can remember waiting for the next flash of lightning, hoping that he'd have moved, that he was all right, and after a while, I—he'd said, keep going up and to the right, and I remember turning away from the cliff. Remember that I felt like I was abandoning him. I had to stop and think which way was right; I was tired and pretty confused."

Something touched the back of his head and he almost jerked away. At the last instant he realized that it was Bren's fingers.

"You've come so far," she said in a soft voice. "I can hardly believe you're the same man. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to see you recovering."

"We understand that we—well, that _I _have a degree of complicity here," Ted said. "At least in the sense that I didn't speak up, didn't turn Joe in as soon as I knew what was going on. I don't know why I didn't do it," he mused. "I guess I just didn't believe it yet. There was so much going on—we'd just lost the back quarter of our property, had seen our stables slide away to nothing. Nothing felt completely real—"

"I have no interest in involving the two of you in this," Aaron said. "I can understand loyalty to an old friend." He glanced in the side view mirror and waved at his son in the car behind them. Jess in the front seat and Jack in the back both waved back vigorously. "You know what? I don't want to talk about that. I just want to enjoy being out. Out of the cell, out of the hospital."

"Suit yourself," said Ted. "Meanwhile, in about three minutes, we'll be coming up on a set of barriers to our right where a road's been blocked off. There's a tire store there, I'm gonna pull in and go inside so you and Bren can take a good look. Up at the top, that's pretty close to where you came out of the mine. Walk around a bit, over to the other side, it's maybe half a mile's walk, you can see where there's a narrow little waterfall—that's what happened to the stream y'all came out into."

"That's—that's where I damn near slid down the hill?" Hotchner asked, wonder in his voice.

"Didn't know about that," Ted replied tersely. "Big chunk of this little lump of land, it doesn't have a proper name, but it runs—_ran_ up along Blue Bauman, it got lost in the flooding, too."

_Another place I could've died._

"How far is the landslide from where the, uh, the mine entrance was?"

"Wasn't a mine entrance, not in any serious sense of the word," the retired engineer said. "It was a product of erosion over the years; every time the crick swelled over, it ate away at the little aperture that was already there."

_The flake of fish food hanging in mid-air._

"So there were two mudslides this week?"

"Three," said Bren. "Blue B. was the biggest, this was almost as big. A smaller one about a mile from here. Remarkable how much they've got cleaned up already, although I don't think they're gonna try to dig out the road that got buried here. Nothing at the end of it but some abandoned farm buildings; not worth the effort."

Hawthorne's car bounced into the gravel parking lot of the store—which appeared to be more an auto parts place than a tire store—and the SUV followed them. Ted climbed out of the car, and after a few seconds, Aaron followed suit, only instead of following Ted into the store, he started back to the SUV.

JJ had her door open and was standing beside it, the engine off. "What's up?" she said.

Aaron made his way carefully over the uneven ground, his cane digging into the gravel at odd angles. "Ted needs something, I guess," he said calmly.

He stopped a few feet from the SUV and jerked his head slightly, beckoning her to come over to where he stood. When she got there, he nodded toward the barriers with their flashing yellow caution lights and the large and unnecessary signs warning _Road Closed Ahead_.

"Near as we can tell," he told her, keeping his voice deliberately low, "that's where we came out. That's the only slide that happened well after the main slide."

JJ turned her own head and squinted into the late afternoon sun at the massive wedge of clay and earth blocking the road to a depth of at least twenty feet. "So—Warden's somewhere in there?"

"It's only a guess," Hotch said. "I lost so much time wandering around, I don't know that we'll ever know for sure."

**~ o ~**

When her mobile went off, Jennifer Jareau felt almost guilty. "Hey, Morgan," she said to the agent who was now chasing the Wisconsin creep who buried girls. "How's it going?"

"This is one of those times Hotch would sum up as 'less than optimal,'" he said. "It's starting to look like we have another copycat, like we need more of his kind. How's the Boy doing?"

_The Boy?_ JJ shifted in her lawn chair and looked at Aaron Hotchner by the light of a trio of tall lawn lamps. "He seems just fine," she said. "We're out at the Hawthornes' place, the sun just went down, we grilled steaks and rode the Hawthornes' horses and we visited the place down the hill where they found Hotch. Right now, 'the Boy' is drinking beer and playing some kind of card game with Ted Hawthorne. Sean's talking cooking with Brenda. Jessica and Jack are playing with the Hawthornes' Wii."

"Wait, you're not at the hospital?"

"No, Hotch's therapist OK'd him to leave the grounds as long as we were with him and he was back by nine. We'll be leaving in about forty minutes." She snapped a couple pictures and hit Send. "We're doing fine. You want to talk to him?"

There were a few seconds of silence, then Morgan said, "Nah, that's okay. So what do you think, Jayje? Will we get our fully functional Unit Chief back any time soon?"

JJ watched the lean man in the red shirt, his torso already starting to fill out a little, an open and unforced grin on his face as he did something with his cards.

"I think we're well on our way," she said, overwhelmed by a sense of satisfaction. "You know, Morgan, I think we finally have our miracle."


	54. A Meeting of Minds

A/N: Written as always with Esperanta, whose intelligence and sensibilities inform every page of this story. We own nothing but this plot and our original characters.

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Fifty-Four**

**A Meeting of Minds**

He heard a familiar rattling. For the first time he recognized it immediately as the little wheeled blood-pressure device the nurses pushed along in front of them every shift change like a miniature vacuum cleaner. The one for his floor, or maybe just for this part of the floor, had a loose wheel or something, like an old shopping cart, and it rattled and whined just a little bit.

Today, however, at—he checked his wristwatch—at 6:22 on Sunday morning, the nineteenth of September, his fifth day of freedom, he had not mistaken it even for a second for Warden's elevator.

"Morning," he mumbled at the cheerful staffer, and presented his left arm for the Velcro cuff.

"Morning," she replied, and stuck a thermometer in his mouth.

"Hey, Aaron," a familiar voice said from behind her. He hit the switch for the reading light and saw MacKinley Pearson, in dress shirt and a blue suit with a faint pinstripe. He'd shaved, but the psychiatrist wore no tie and his hair still looked as if he'd combed it with a garden rake.

"Mumpm," he said around the thermometer. It beeped, perhaps in sympathy, and the nurse removed it, looked at it, and popped its little plastic sheath into the trash beside the bed. "What are you doing up so early?"

"Looking for worms," Pearson said. He peeked shamelessly at the readout of Hotchner's blood pressure. "Good grief, you're a reptile," he said, arching an eyebrow.

"It's always low," Aaron said. "Especially when I've been asleep."

Pearson consulted a smartphone or a PDA, it was hard to tell because the doctor's meaty hand was cupped around it. "Yeah," he said at last, "and that was even before the change in meds, so good."

When the nurse was gone, Pearson pulled a chair over beside the bed and said in a low voice, "So how are the mice?"

"Hard to tell," Hotchner replied. "Either they aren't there as much or I'm learning to ignore them, and I'm not sure which just yet."

"And the nightmares?"

"I had one early in the night, but it wasn't a cell or a hospital dream; just an everyday '_hey you fucked up again'_ dream."

"You know, fella, it wouldn't kill you to pursue this nightmare stuff when you get home. I know you feel that you have it all sussed out, it's just part of how you deal, but what if it's not? What if there's a better, a more coherent and less painful, way to deal with your stress?"

"I'm fine."

"Mm." Pearson sounded remarkably like David Rossi did when Aaron spoke those two words—two parts sympathy, three parts, _yeah, right_.

"What are you doing here this early, anyway?"

Pearson grinned. "Ordinarily I keep my personal life out of my therapeutic relationships, but that seems a little silly when you can call your people and have the answer in three minutes anyhow. Maybe it's the principle of the thing. Ah, well—there's a church down that way—" He jerked his head to the left, indicating the north end of the street that ran beneath Hotchner's window. "The pastor's on leave; illness in the family. My wife's subbing for him, and there are two Sunday services, seven-thirty and ten. We don't get that much time together, so I like to hang out with her on Sunday mornings. I just sit there and look respectable and keep my big fat agnostic mouth shut, you know what I'm saying?"

"Your wife's a priest?" He hadn't even considered that Pearson might be married, let alone what she might do for a living. He wore no ring.

"Minister." Pearson shifted in his chair. "How'd your off-campus visit go?"

Hotchner raised the headboard. "Wonderful," he sighed. "Frightening. Troubling. And I need another pass for today."

Pearson nodded. "No problem. Care to elaborate a little on some of those adjectives?"

Hotchner had his mouth open to ask which one, but he realized that Pearson would want him to pick. Would derive information from his choice as well as what he had to say.

_Stop trying to second-guess him; he's here to help you._

"'Frightening,'" he said. "The second slide, the Menard Road slide—that happened just about the time we got out of the mine, and that's where he held on to me. It can't have been during the main slide—there's no way he could have held on—but it was probably only a few minutes before it. If he'd failed, if I'd slid down, I might never have made it back up before the main slide started. If we'd been just an hour later in getting out of there, we'd both be dead, because that whole section is gone."

He fixed his eyes on Pearson. "One of the reasons that not much was lost in the slides was that the authorities have been warning for years that the area above the mine was unstable. When he—when Warden came back, the elevator shaft was already gone. For all he knew, I was gone. He didn't have to go crawling through there in the dark, putting his life on the line for me, but he did. And he did it in a way—look, I've put my own life on the line a few times. You're aware, but—" His voice trailed off.

"So—there's 'wonderful,'" he said quickly. "Sitting outside, watching the sun go down. Riding horses with my brother and my son, with JJ, with Jess. Drinking a couple beers, and two was almost too much. If I'd drunk them any faster, I'd have been pretty loopy. Just kicking back and being a dad. When you're locked up, you think about the big things, about school plays and soccer games, about—

"—Have to tell you," he interrupted himself yet again. "Something good that came out of everything. He—Warden—"

"Call him by name."

"Norton. Norton did this thing where he talked about the seven deadly sins. I tried to turn it to my advantage, trying to find out more about him. In the process, he got me talking about my father."

Pearson, unhelpfully, said nothing at all, reminding Hotchner yet again of why he hated therapists.

"End of story," Aaron said, "was that my father had to be the best, had to be right. There was never a time when he wasn't on top. If I did something he couldn't do, he devalued the crap out of it." _He punished me for it_, he added to himself. "We talked about the fact that when he—meaning Warden, Norton—when he read _Fox in Socks_ to his daughter, she'd laugh when he screwed up."

_Again with that totally fucking useless therapeutic silence._

"I practiced it," Aaron said finally. "I practiced the parts I had trouble with, so I wouldn't screw up. I couldn't even let the kid be best at _'Gooey goo for chewy chewing, that's what that Goo-goose is doing.'_ So yesterday I played War with Jack and he won. He won," he repeated, wonderingly. "And it was terrific. He was so thrilled, so empowered. And I have to think, how long would I have gone on having to win, like my dad, if I hadn't been, well, forced into it, forced into looking at what I did in the light of what my own father did. So that's one thing Joe did, he steered my thinking that way sooner rather than later."

"Joe?"

"Um, yeah. Warden. He was born Norton Charpentier, but when he got out of prison he took a new name, a new identity. For the last few years, he's been Joseph McAfee."

Pearson's features were immobile, but he blinked rapidly several times. He sat very still for a moment or two, then drew a deep breath. "Would you like to talk about your father a little more?" he said at last, his voice calm and controlled. "I recall you saying that he scared you. What did he do for a living?"

_Those blinks are a classic tell. _"You know him, don't you?" Aaron whispered. "Joe McAfee. You know Warden."

Pearson nodded slightly. "Slightly, yes. We use therapy dogs in the wards and therapy horses at the kids' camp," he replied, then firmly returned to his subject. "What did your dad do?"

"He was a defense attorney," Hotchner said. "And, yeah, you could say my entire career path has been a cosmic _fuck-you_ to my father. This is awkward, isn't it? You knowing McAfee."

"Not well," Pearson said. "I've met him, we've spoken a bit. I don't know where he lives, don't know much about him other than in his role with the animals." He shook his head slowly. "It might even be a different Joseph McAfee."

"It isn't. He teaches at Hazelhurst College and trains therapy animals."

"Ah. Well." Pearson sighed. "I suppose I should have anticipated that this could happen. One would think that, given my profession and my wife's, I'd have—"

"Given _my_ profession, I know that very few criminals give off vibes you can pick up. It just isn't that easy." Aaron was aware that Pearson was looking unhappily at Hotch's wrists, still bare and pink as they healed. "This," he said, lifting them, "I did myself, fighting against the handcuffs."

"But you didn't put them on your own wrists."

Hotchner sensed where Pearson was going. "Not that time. But often, yes. I did whatever he told me to do." The psychiatrist looked conflicted. _Welcome to my world, Mac._ "How does that change how you feel about what I've been telling you?"

Pearson sat back in his chair and inhaled sharply. "I'm not sure it's helpful to reflect on that at the moment," he said at last. "We're here for you and your recovery."

"A case can be made that this is part of my recovery."

"That's bullshit, Aaron, and we have a no-bullshit commitment here. What's so scary to you right now that you'd rather focus our limited time and energy on how I feel about knowing who Warden was?"

"Past tense," Aaron said.

The shrink all but rolled his eyes. "Insignificant," he snapped. "'Warden' was a role, and he's stepped outside of it, according to you."

Hotchner looked at the psychiatrist helplessly for a few seconds, then forced himself to look within, at the things that most troubled him. He'd never shone at introspection, preferring to buy the same 'I'm fine,' 'I'm OK' line that he fed everyone else. Like most self-deceptions, it was essentially a survival strategy that had outlived its usefulness.

_Face it, Slick._

He wished he were upright and fully dressed in some other room, where he could get up and walk—OK, limp—around to distract himself and discharge energy. He thought better on his feet. This hospital bed deal, with Pearson's chair pulled up so chummily just inches away, was less than optimal.

"OK, fine," he said at last with a sigh. "I think that I want him to go free. I'll know for sure after I've spoken to him, but I'm ninety-something percent confident that I don't want him arrested. I don't want to testify against him, and I don't want him back in prison. I know—" He patted the laptop on the tray table with his right hand. "I've read what the Team had on Norton Charpentier. I know what happened to him in prison, I've read his medical records; I know what the other inmates did to him. He was timid and intellectual and an easy target, and the fact that his conviction was for producing kiddie porn just made it worse for him. And all of that's my fault. All of it," he insisted, glaring at Pearson's dubiously raised eyebrow.

"Sure, he was an arrogant elitist asshole and he did himself no favors in court," he conceded. "But if I'd pursued that tape, he never would have gone to trial in the first place."

Abruptly he fell silent, remembering Warden's mockery of Aaron's private school, calling him the 'Burning Hills Country Day School boy.' But Charpentier himself, in spite of his—_yeah, he lied when he said he'd gone to a big public school, didn't he? Or did he just imply it and I jumped at it?_—Charpentier himself was a product of St. Benedict's, more expensive, more exclusive, than Burning Hills.

"Talk to me," said Pearson.

"Just more insight that I didn't need into Nortie's personality," he replied stonily. "And, yes, I still don't want him arrested.

"But at the same time, these two acts—withholding exculpatory evidence in '93, and deciding now to mislead my own Team about the identity of a man they've been pursuing for months—how can I in good conscience represent myself as _worthy_ to serve with the Bureau?" he said, surprising even himself with his passion, blinking back maddening, unwelcome tears. "But it's all I want—it's all I am."

Pearson regarded him with solemn eyes. "Has your service otherwise been utterly upright and ethical?"

"Yes," he said, then heard himself blurt, "No, no, of course not. We all make compromises with our morality. I've lied to the team, I've covered up—situations—to my superiors. There's still a lot I'm withholding about—"

His voice trailed off. In silence, he contemplated the many ways he'd shaded the truth, even actively misled Strauss. Lied to Gideon, to whatsisname Franklin. Lies noble (taking the hit for Gideon after the mess with the suicidal coed, covering for Reid while he got his act back together after Henkel) and ignoble (covering for Elle after she gunned down an UNSUB in cold blood).

"It's a spectrum," he said at last. "It's a continuum. I've been in a few places, but my choices have always been on the honorable end of it. And this—this is a harder choice."

"And?" Pearson produced a tie from one of his coat pockets and began sliding it under the collar of his dress shirt.

"I think I won't know for sure until I've spoken to him. I'll know by tonight," he said, more confidently. "I'm going to see him today."

"How's that going to work?"

"Jess and Jack are attending a street carnival in Altoona."

"The Fall Fun Fair?" When Hotchner nodded, Pearson said, "They'll have a great time. The weather's decent for it this year, at least."

"My brother, Sean, has gone back to New York, and I encouraged JJ to take the day off and visit her folks. Since I'm getting released tomorrow, the pressure's off. They think I'm going back out to the Hawthornes for the day. Do you know them, too? Ted and Bren Hawthorne?"

"Names don't sound familiar," Pearson said. He adjusted the knot on his tie. "I'll be here tonight, just in case you need someone to talk to after your meeting. Call my service from there, from here—from wherever. Let me know when you're back. Deal?"

"Deal."

**~ o ~**

He looked, she decided, like one of those tough-ass FBI agents on TV: lean, hard, muscular. Stoic. Even the slight hesitation in his gait as he made his way from the front doors of the hospital (where he'd traveled in a wheelchair, hospital regs being inflexible) to the car that was waiting a few feet away seemed more purposeful than a sign of weakness. She could all but visualize him in a Kevlar vest with _FBI_ emblazoned across the chest, his handgun raised, grim determination in his eyes.

_He would've frightened me,_ she decided. She could understand why Joe—why _Norton_—had kept him cuffed to a metal bar whenever he was in the same area with him. Well, not truly understand; Joe's behavioral choices—_Norton's_, dammit—were inexcusable, but she could see why, once he'd committed himself to his course of action, he'd made some of his strategic decisions. Hotchner absolutely radiated power and control.

Then she saw the flicker of fear, of uncertainty, in his dark eyes as he caught sight of her, as he nodded in greeting. She recalled the confused and terrified man on the night of the storm and remembered him shivering in her arms. _We are all complex creatures, ever greater than the sum of our parts._

"Hey," she said.

He dimpled a smile in return. "Hey."

Another flicker of unease. "Would you want to sit in the back with me?"

He hesitated for a moment, then said, "Sure." His smile broadened. "I'd like that."

"Do you mind, Teddy?" she asked.

Her husband gave a good-natured "Nope," and flipped the locks up for the back seat. "I'll be your cabbie."

She held the door for him, then circled around the back of the sedan and climbed in behind her husband. Agent Hotchner adjusted his seat belt and settled in, facing stolidly forward.

"Does he know you're coming?" she asked.

"No," he replied. His voice was low and deliberate. "You didn't tell him?"

"We didn't think it was our place. You hadn't asked us to prepare him, so—I can still call him. Do you want me to—"

"It's fine," he said. "Really." His face was now fully composed, but his hands gave him away, gripping his trousers—no jeans today; he would meet Joe in khakis and a black knit shirt—his fingers twisted into the tan fabric just above the knees.

**~ o ~**

The former Norton Charpentier sat up in bed listening to Tchaikovsky's Fifth through ear buds so he wouldn't bother his new roomie, the guy who'd come out of the surgical recovery suite the previous afternoon following a motorcycle accident, a younger guy who mostly just lay there and groaned and cursed. The ear buds also kept New Guy's groans and curses and perpetual demands for someone to _'stop the pain and give me more fuckin' morphine, what's my fuckin' insurance paying you for? Your looks?'_ from bothering Nortie. Norton was playing a dispirited game of Free Cell, and the game was freaking killing him, too.

"Mr. McAfee?" an aide said. She was standing in his doorway alongside a transportation aide whose hands rested on the handles of a wheelchair. He removed one ear bud and regarded her quizzically. He'd already been to physical therapy—yes, they even had it on Sundays. "Can we relocate you for a bit?" she asked.

"Relocate?"

"If you don't mind," she said. She looked significantly toward Charpentier's roommate. "You have company, and we thought you'd prefer privacy."

He understood her meaning immediately. "Of course," he said, all courtesy and cooperation, even as his heart sank—_Genie hasn't come back with the meds yet, oh shit, oh shit_—and closed his laptop so he could move his legs to the side.

Like a man in a dream, barely aware of sight and sound, of anything but the sure knowledge that this, his second life, was ending the same way the first had, in a federal penitentiary, he braced his hands on the side of the mattress and heaved himself to his right foot. He pivoted and clutched the armrests of the chair. He lowered himself to a sitting position, wondering if he should ask to use the bathroom first; his insides roiled with dread.

In his left ear, Tchaikovsky horns rumbled dutifully into the second movement.

_Too bad it wasn't the _Pathétique._ Could use a little sympathy right now. Or maybe all those martial jack-booted thugs from Shostakovitch's Seventh that Hotchner hated so much._

He winced as they arranged his left leg along the extended support. He wondered whether they'd deny him pain meds altogether in jail. They had a right to do that, of course. If they were angry—as surely they must be at what he'd done to a man in law enforcement—they could take out some of their aggression in passive ways.

He fought off a wave of self-pity by reminding himself of the days Aaron Hotchner had spent in the cold and the dark, naked and battered. _You did that_, he reminded himself firmly._ Don't forget it for an instant._

The aide arranged a light linen blanket over his legs, attached his IV line to the side of the chair, and said, "There you go! All set! Is there anything you'd like to take along?"

_Take along?_

_Of course: my confession._

"My laptop," he said. "You can just yank the power cord. I won't have it on that long."

"Oh, it's no problem," she said sweetly. "Don't want you to lose power when you're doing something important. We can plug it in for you down the hall."

"Fine." He knew his voice sounded feeble, dispirited, but he couldn't scare up anything more energetic than the barest, the most ingrained courtesies.

Once his laptop and power cord were under his arm, they pushed him down the hall and rolled him into the same small room where he'd had his confession with Father Chedjou the day before. This time, they set him up so he faced the door. The aide connected his laptop for him and arranged a nearby tray table so he could access it easily, along with the ubiquitous little tissue box and plastic water pitcher and disposable cups and a plastic emesis basin—_like they expect me to barf when they arrest me?_—and three drinking straws wrapped in paper.

He opened the computer, signed back in, and disconnected the ear buds, After a moment, he realized that he'd bumped something. The music emanating from his internal speakers was the second movement of Brahms' First. Elegant, melodic, but far too sentimental, it was a lousy choice for Music to Get Arrested To. He moved his hand to turn it off, and there was a light tap at the door.

"Yeah," he said heavily. He licked his lips and took a long, deep breath. "Come on in."

His heart stopped. His breath stopped. His vision clouded.

The tall, gaunt man in a black knit shirt and khakis limped into the room unaccompanied. He was gripping a metal cane tightly and favoring his left leg. He made his slow and deliberate way to the other chair, and looked the former Norton Charpentier over slowly, head to toe, his expression impenetrable. Nortie wondered whether the visitor knew that it was all he could do to breathe, that his chest felt hopelessly constricted, that the one eye he could open fully was clouding over, stinging furiously.

Hotchner sat down in the chair opposite him, his face a mask. Maybe-Norton, Maybe-Joe was reminded of the times that they'd faced each other through the bars of the exercise cage, he in his old green recliner, and his former prisoner in the blue armchair he'd provided. He was reminded of civil, even warm conversations about family, about religion and law enforcement. Games of cribbage and checkers, strange and surreal singalongs to artists from Aerosmith to the Beatles to LL Cool J, Warden and Prisoner, tenor and bass.

The lawyer continued studying him, his features still revealing nothing. Finally he returned his gaze to Norton's face and shook his head. "Jesus Christ, Joe, you look like fuckin' hell," Aaron Hotchner said. "You get the number of that truck?"

For a moment, Norton couldn't quite believe his ears. _He called me Joe?_

Maybe because he'd put himself on common-courtesies autopilot already, before he even realized he was speaking, the words tumbled from Charpentier's lips. "You don't look so hot yourself, man."

At first there was no reaction. _Aw, shit, what was I thinking? This is the man who's going to arrest me and put me away for the rest of my life._ Then Hotchner suddenly broke into a grin, utterly disarming, and with a warmth that nearly took Norton's breath away.

_How could I have ever sensed evil in this man? He's looking at me like a long-lost friend, _a friend,_ for God's sake. And after all I did to him…._

Suddenly tears streamed down his face. He wanted to speak, but the ability eluded him. He could barely breathe. He managed to choke out "I—I—I," but he could form nothing else. "I—I—I," he started again, then stopped because he was starting to sound like a singer with a mariachi band.

Hotchner said something but Charpentier's breath was so ragged and his heart was pounding so loudly in his ears that he couldn't make it out the first time. "What?" he finally managed to squeak.

"I forgive you," the man opposite him said solemnly.

_Aw, Jesus Christ…._

Those three terrifying words enabled him to break free of his inability to articulate.

"Oh God, I'm so sorry, Aaron," he managed to moan. "So sorry. I know that words are useless, worthless, that they can never give you back what I took from you—and I'm not trying to dodge responsibility—but they're all I've got."

The agent leaned forward slightly his voice a deep, authoritative rumble. "Look, Joe," he said quietly, "you're still alive and I'm still alive. At this stage of the game, nothing else matters. Let's just take it one step at a time, shall we? No grand plans, no big strategies. One—" He glanced first at Norton's leg, then at his own cane. "One _careful_ step at a time."

"I—it's a great idea," Norton-or-Joe began slowly, still struggling to speak through his misery, "but you're not the one sitting here trying to figure out when the hammer's gonna drop, when your people are—"

"'My people,'" Hotchner said, "as you put it, are in Wisconsin, doing what they do best. The, uh, the guy who did this to me, he's dead, you see. I saw him fall, saw him lying there dead." He shook his head slowly. "I was ambivalent about it. I still am. I'm conflicted, because he died trying to get me to some place where he could set me free."

Norton—_am I truly Joe now?_—fumbled for one of those itty bitty tissues the hospital gave out, tried to blow his nose, grabbed more tissues. "He was a jerk, an asshole," he managed to choke out. "A vengeful asshole."

Hotchner gave a slow, sage nod. "He was indeed. Of course, the arrogant asshole who put him in prison had his moments, too, you know. He wasn't always—" He gestured broadly. "—such a prince of a fellow."

Norton gave a weak smile, tried to chuckle, but dissolved into a coughing fit. When he finally got it under control, he said, "Maybe not a prince, but not deserving of being the Man in the Iron Mask, either."

"Well, at least things never got quite to that point," Aaron said quietly.

_How can he sit there so calm, so composed? Because he's twice the man you are, or will ever be, and you know it._ He looked down, his fists clenching the blanket, twisting it as he himself felt twisted between relief and misery. _I'm glad I'm not going to be arrested, but I don't know if I can take this...this new situation, either._

At last he looked up, smiled sadly at Hotchner, and said softly, "You know, I...I've been doing a lot of thinking, a lot of self-examination, and I don't like what I see. I've talked to a priest, and that helped a little, but I'm just not sure how I could possibly live with myself after this."

Hotchner made a wry face. "Welcome to my world. I'm not sure how I can live with what I did to you. I'm not sure how I can live with lying to my Team." He drew a deep breath of his own. "But I know that I can't identify you to them. I know that I can't testify against you—"

"You don't have to!" Norton-or-Joe said quickly. "I have my whole confession here, everything from the very beginning right up until I left last Sunday night." _God in Heaven, was it really only a week ago?_ "I've been completely straightforward, I've made no excuses. I'm prepared to plead guilty and take—"

"No," the agent said sharply. "Look at me, Norton."

Charpentier obeyed wordlessly.

"You grew up Catholic. I saw the file on you; if you hadn't faked your death so perfectly you would have been at the top of their suspect list. I know from personal experience with you how important taking responsibility is with you. I know you believe in penitence, but you also believe in absolution."

Charpentier gave a mute nod.

"You have a life, Joe. Norton. Eventually I have to make up my mind which name I'm going to use," Hotchner said with a faint grin. Charpentier noticed that he didn't include the name of Warden. "Joe probably works best, because you're Joe now. You're doing a lot of good things with your life, teaching college, training therapy animals. You have friends and people who care about you, people who need you. You can still make a difference in people's lives."

With a shock, something Norton—no, _Joe_—had seen on the wall of Prisoner's—_Aaron's_—cell after he'd fought his way through the rising flood waters to reach him, release him, came suddenly into his mind: I WANTED TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE….

"You make a difference," Joe whispered. "You have to turn me in."

"Why?"

"Because you already said you couldn't live with lying to your Team. I've done enough harm; I can't live with destroying your ability to, to practice your profession, too."

Hotchner stared at him for a long moment, then seemed to come to some kind of internal conclusion. "Make you a deal," he said, leaning forward with a scary intensity.

Joseph McAfee didn't hesitate for a second. "Name it."

"I absolve you and as your _penance_—" He nodded firmly, underscoring the significance of the word, "you go and live your life as Joe McAfee, never mentioning what happened between us, and never forgetting for a moment that you have within you the capacity to be a monster. And we all have it, Joe. I do, you do, we all have that capacity."

"But Bren and Ted know—"

"They brought me here and we've already discussed—" Aaron interrupted himself, staring wide-eyed suddenly at McAfee's laptop. "What is that?" he whispered hoarsely. "That music, what is that?"

"Um, Brahms' First Symphony, the, ah, the fourth movement." And as he spoke he distinctly remembered a rainy Friday night, a bound and blindfolded man huddled soaking wet in the passenger seat of his Kia, and Brahms' First on the CD player. And he knew by looking into the man's eyes that Hotchner recalled that night, too. It was not too long after he'd shocked the poor guy with the Enforcer accidentally turned all the way up.

"At the time," Hotchner said, his voice breaking, "I thought that melody, that theme—it was either the saddest or the most beautiful melody I'd ever heard. I mean, I know I was—a little on the emotionally vulnerable side at the time—" He swiped at one eye. "Did you plan it this way? For that to be playing?"

"No way. I was listening to Tchaikovsky and the cursor must have moved when they were wheeling me down here. I thought—" He swallowed hard. "I thought they'd taken me from my room to arrest me."

"Nah," Aaron assured him airily, "they'd just handcuff you to your bed."

The part of Joe McAfee that would always be Norton Charpentier suddenly found that funny, and he bit back a bark of a laugh. "Thanks for clearing that up."

Aaron Hotchner extended his hand. "Can you live with that deal? Because if you can, I'll be able to live with going back to the Bureau."

Joe clasped the hand, still overwhelmed with stunned disbelief. "Deal," he whispered.


	55. Justice Begins Again

A/N: **Can you believe it? We're done!** Written as always with Esperanta, whose intelligence and sensibilities inform every page of this story. We own nothing but this plot and our original characters. Personal issues again delayed us, but we're safely through them now. **Thank you, everyone who stayed the course with us!**

**Solitary 5.0**

**Chapter Fifty-Five**

**Justice Begins Again**

**Late September: Many Happy Returns**

The trip home to Virginia was accomplished in Jessica's red Mustang convertible, which was new to Hotchner. It was a warm, sunshiny Monday, so they'd lowered the top. Aaron sat in the front passenger seat in sunglasses, head thrown back ecstatically, freed at last from IV ports, plastic bracelets, and silly-ass regulations about how and where he could walk.

JJ and Jack sat in the back, and everyone sang along with the stuff Jess had on her sound system, lots of Madonna, Lauper, Mitchell, and Carly Simon. Hotchner missed the Joan Jett and Suzi Quatro songs Warden—no, _Joe_—had sent him. He'd grown attached to them, he realized.

They ate at two restaurants and stopped at a roadside park to drink canned sodas and watch Jack work out his preschooler's energy on the monkey bars. What could have been a four-hour drive took almost seven hours, but Aaron inhaled every glorious minute of it.

**~ o ~**

Wednesday started out damp and overcast, but by the time Genie Cruz got free of her Intro to Contemporary European Poetry class to pick up Joe McAfee at Nittany St. Luke's, the sun had come out and the temperature was comfortably in the seventies. They stopped at Eagle on the way home, to fill his prescriptions and pick up some staples, then at Arby's for the sandwich special and giant jamocha shakes.

Genie offered to run him past the school to pick up the previous Friday's paycheck, but he was more interested in fighting his way up the thirteen carpeted steps (including the landing) from the entry door to his apartment, a crutch under his left arm and his right arm braced against the wrought iron bannister, to take any interest in finances. When he fell at last with gratitude into his familiar cocoa-brown recliner in front of the entertainment center, he was starting to think, _OK, maybe I can do this_.

**~ o ~**

The Team, minus JJ, returned to Quantico at noon on Thursday, satisfied at a solid bust of a well-prepared but easily panicked copycat killer whom they'd buffaloed into making a few major errors in judgment. They stuck around long enough to ensure that all the paperwork was completed, then adjourned in a body to a rib joint for a late lunch and a few celebratory drinks. To everyone's surprise (except Rossi, who'd placed the calls) and delight, Hotch, JJ, and Will joined them. Aaron drank sparingly, since he was still on meds, but he acquitted himself impressively at the buffet.

Already his face and torso were filling out again. The narrow creases that had appeared in his cheeks were all but gone. He was still using the cane, but he was no longer leaning on it as hard or gripping it as tightly as he had at the hospital.

As a group, as a _family_, they drank to the fact that on Monday, JJ would rejoin them as press liaison. On Tuesday, Hotch was scheduled for his first meeting with Bureau counselors prior to starting the whole recertification rigamarole.

**~ o ~**

Erin Strauss woke up moaning at two in the morning on Saturday, the fifth day since Hotch had come home. Her sleepy and baffled husband held her and soothed her, but she seemed unable to express whatever she'd been dreaming about.

There was no way to tell that kind, well-meaning gentleman that now that Aaron Hotchner had returned safe and sound, she no longer had dreams about people bringing his head to her front door. Instead, apparently her libido had decided that it was once again appropriate to have vivid erotic dreams where the once-and-future Unit Chief made crazy-ferocious love to her as she lay splayed across her desk.

**October: Major Changes**

Two weeks into his renewed life, Aaron found that he'd acquired the ability to cut through the bullshit. Whereas previously, when something came up that wasn't job-related, he'd tended to dither and examine his options repeatedly, now his personal life had greater clarity.

Just a week after he returned to the house Jessica had been maintaining for him, he realized that he had limited physical and emotional resources, and what he had of them needed to be spent on his profession and his son. Home ownership was something his parents and his late wife had valued, but it took too much time, too much trouble, for him to justify.

By the second week of October, when the Team returned triumphantly from nailing the Prince of Darkness in Los Angeles, Aaron and Jack Hotchner had moved into another apartment in the complex where they had lived previously. The layout was identical, and already his son was busily renewing his friendships with kids in the building. Hotchner's lawyer was handling all the real estate details, and had assured Aaron that he'd at least break even.

As a consequence, instead of spending a fun-filled weekend cleaning gutters and winterizing the house, he was at the park with his son, shoving the little merry-go-round as fast as he could, then leaping aboard with Jack. The boy clung to one of the metal supports and jumped up and down each time they passed the white line on the ground as though leaping over it. Aaron half-sat on another metal support, his hands in the pockets of his pullover, luxuriating in the feel of the breeze in his hair and watching the glee on Jack's face.

"Daddy," the boy said as the merry-go-round slowed, "how did you get out of the big box?"

Early on, he'd responded to his son's (surprisingly few) questions about what had happened to him by saying that a bad man had locked him up in a big metal box in a cave.

Now he wondered for a few seconds how on earth to answer his son's question. He didn't want Jack to grow up afraid of caves or boxes or rain or even people, very few of whom were evil, after all. At last he said, "There was a lot of rain and it got kind of floody in the cave, so he came down to get me, to help me out. He didn't want me to be stuck in the flood."

"The bad man?" Jack seemed dubious on that point.

Hotchner gazed off into the distance, watching a flock of birds rise from the trees, turn, wheel like a great boiling feathery cloud, and fly away. "Even bad people can do good things, Jack. You know that sometimes good people do bad things, right?"

"Uh-huh."

"So he decided to do a good thing. He came down and got me and helped me through the cave. It was dark and scary and we dropped the flashlight—" He had a sudden vivid memory of dropping his flashlight, their last flashlight, of lunging for it in the knee-deep water, but he missed it and so did Warden, and they'd watched together, cursed together, as it spiraled off, its beam winking merrily, then vanished down the same hole the two men had just climbed out of, gone forever.

He grinned at his son. "It was scary, but not too scary, because I was with him, and he knew all about the different parts of the cave, well, most of them. I was glad I wasn't alone." Aaron held his breath, hoping his all-too-logical son wouldn't follow that line of reasoning too far.

To his relief, Jack just nodded, then gripped the metal bar more tightly. "Again, Daddy!"

Hotchner leaped lightly off the revolving platform—the bruises on the soles of his feet from hours of tramping shoeless across rock and uncleared ground were long gone, and however he'd wrenched his left knee during his wanderings on Blue Bauman, he was down now to just the occasional twinge. "You got it, Buddy," he said, and bent to propel the merry-go-round forward again.

**~ o ~**

One drizzly evening in late October, Joe McAfee and Genie Cruz sat across Joe's small living room from each other. Genie was in the rocker, correcting essays. Joe had the lapboard over his legs in the recliner. He'd been making preliminary sketches for the upcoming Introduction to Set Design 301 class when he suddenly gazed with deep affection at the woman with the gamine hairdo and that impish smile—so gloriously, so painfully, like Diana's. The widow and mother of three delightful children who loved them both well and wisely.

"Miz Eugenia?" he said softly.

She looked up at him over her reading glasses. "Mm?"

He gathered his courage. "We need to have a talk."

Something like panic shone in her eyes, and she removed the specs. "Why?"

_You can do this._ He cleared his throat once, twice. Smiled, probably a lot more weakly than he intended to. "I, ah, I've been giving some thought to taking this, this thing we have, to the next level?" _Whoa. Didn't intend for that questioning inflection to be there. Sounding like junior high, redux. _

Like a heavy-handed screen-wipe, the expression of panic faded from her face and a cautious interest settled in. "Tell me more," she said, her voice soft and encouraging.

"That's all there is. My feelings for you keep getting stronger, and I'd like to, to—before you make a decision, there are a couple things you need to know about me."

She settled back in the rocker and clasped her hands together over the essays in her lap. "Go on," she said, her voice still low and cautious.

_Just _do_ it! _"OK. A few years ago, I lost everything—literally everything that ever had meaning to me. My wife, my family, my profession, my reputation. Yeah," he added as her eyes grew wide. "I was married. We had children. They're dead. I'll never stop mourning them, but I _am_ ready to move on, I think."

She looked surprised, but she whispered, "I'm so sorry, Joey."

"Don't be, not yet. What happened to me was grossly unfair, and the people who engineered it tried to set my life straight again with a few words and a whole bunch of money. Money!" He shook his head in dismay. "As if money can fix anything like that. So I just kept moving in this spiral of despair until I got to the point—" He deliberately fudged the year, keeping it as general as he could. "—just about fifteen years ago where there was nothing left. I had two choices: I could die, or I could become someone else.

"So I arranged for it to look like the person I was had died, and I became someone else. And the only reason this is important, the only reason I have to tell you this, is that while the original Joe McAfee—the dead guy whose identity I took, turned sixty back in June, the real me is still forty-nine; I won't be fifty until next month." (Because surely, as a young widow with kids, she'd be concerned about the likelihood that a new man wouldn't have one foot in the grave, too—right?)

Genie stared at him for a long time, then she said, "So—is that why you have no family back home in British Columbia? Are you even from British Columbia?"

He thought he'd anticipated every question she might ask; that one hadn't even been on the list. "I lived there for a year or so when I was becoming McAfee," he confessed. "But, no, I'm not from B.C. I was born in Maryland."

There was another silence, longer and perceptibly chillier. "Tell me this is some weird piece of performance art, Joey. Tell me I haven't been falling for a shadow."

"I'm sorry, Genie," he whispered. "It's true. It's so true that I couldn't go on any further with you without coming clean about myself. You're too important to me." He raised his chin high. "You and Josh and Tina and Richie are so important that I had to tell you that there's—more to me, and less to me, than it seems on the surface."

Her face went pink, and he knew she was fighting tears. "So who are you really?"

"I'm really Joe McAfee," he said. "That's who I am now."

"Then who _were_ you? Does _he_ have family? Is Inspector Javert on your tail? Are you some kind of international con man?"

"Who I was is immaterial," he replied, his heart sinking. He hadn't really expected her to leap into his arms, _'Hey, no problem, Joey-boy!'_ but he'd rather hoped things would go better than this. "I have a sister and a niece," he told her, "but they got the payout from my insurance and my will years ago. I'm not about to go looking them up; it would only complicate their lives. There's no Javert pursing me; I didn't change my identity to cover up a crime. I changed my identity because my heart was broken; because I couldn't endure being that man, facing the losses I'd taken constantly, day in and day out. It was cowardly, but it was the choice I made. Believe me, if I'm ever arrested, it'll be for something I've done as Joseph McAfee."

_Boy, ain't _that_ the truth!_

_But he said to live my life. To turn the page on the past._

Her lips compressed into an angry line, Genie gathered her essays and jammed them into her briefcase. "You have two minutes," she informed him, her voice cold and detached, "to tell me how that was just a weird experiment in alternate realities."

"I'm so sorry, Eugenia," he said. "I wouldn't take it back even if I could. You deserve to know the truth about me."

She snapped her case shut, collected her shoes and her jacket. "Ninety seconds."

"Can't do it," he said with a sigh.

True to her word, a minute and a half later, she was gone, closing his apartment door behind her with a sharp snick.

His shoulders sagged. _I actually don't have a life to live. Any old time, Hotchner can decide that he made the wrong choice, and take away everything I have. It's better that I protect Genie and the kids from that kind of upset._

**~ o ~**

David Rossi stopped at a party supply store in a small strip mall early on the morning of the last day of October. It was a beautiful Saturday morning, the sun blindingly bright, on that All Hallow's Eve. Although actual door-to-door trick-or-treaters were rare in his neck of the woods, when he was home he liked to make the experience _special_ for the little rugrats who did show up. If at least one child didn't retreat, screaming, back down the front walk to the arms of his or her parents, Rossi felt that he'd failed.

This year—ahh, _this year_—he planned to return to the cobweb-festooned porch, glowing red and green eyes, and his Count Dracula costume.

As he climbed out of his car and inhaled the sweet autumn smells, he saw a familiar vehicle parked at the far end of the lot. He frowned and studied it. He'd never bothered to memorize his teammates' license plate numbers, but the metallic light green minivan parked with its nose hard up against the redwood fence had Virginia plates. The AAA sticker on the bumper was in exactly the spot where Aaron had put his.

The building housed, according to the small notice posted at the opening in the fence, two obstetric practices, a pediatrician, an advertising agency, and a counseling service.

And—speak of the devil—the man himself, in jeans and fleece jacket, suddenly emerged out of a set of second-floor doors. He looked around, caught sight of Rossi, and waved vaguely at him. Dave locked his car and walked over to Hotchner's van as Aaron all but bounced down the external steps to the parking lot, slipping his sunglasses on as he did so.

"Hey, Aaron," he said. _Damn_, but the man was making a solid recovery: He already had all the meat back on his bones, and his energy levels were, if anything, higher than they'd been just before his abduction.

"Dave," Hotch said with a cordial nod. His head moved slightly—behind the sunglasses he was noticing the party store—"Getting geared up to terrorize the neighborhood kids?"

Rather than answering, Rossi just grinned. "You're looking good, Aaron."

Hotchner sighed slightly, then nodded. "Working on it."

They chatted for a while there in the sun-drenched parking lot, mostly idle Bureau gossip and pleasantries. At no time did Aaron either volunteer where he had been or remove his shades, and that absolutely delighted the senior profiler.

Aaron had been to see a counselor on his own, and not one from the Bureau's own staff. He didn't want Dave to see his eyes, so he'd probably been crying, but he was contented now, loose, relaxed. He was getting stuff out.

He was making progress.

**November: Complications**

Her name was Theresa Charpentier Cable, and she was spending that particular Friday night, her fiftieth birthday, contentedly strolling home from the convenience store, her pug-pitbull mix, Miss Maggie, dancing along beside her on her hot pink leash.

"Happy birthday, Tiska-Taska," a creepily familiar voice said.

She spun to face a slim, inoffensive-looking man on crutches. He had untidy light brown hair (like hers) and serious blue eyes (not like hers; she'd inherited her father's brown eyes). He was familiar, yet he wasn't. And he knew both her birth date and her childhood nickname.

Miss Maggie, who ordinarily sensed Theresa's fear and expressed it as a growl, just stood there looking the man up and down.

"Do I know you?" she asked.

He nodded slowly, sadly. "Yes, Tiskers. Twelve years and two hundred pounds ago, I was your brother."

And while the sensible part of her was screaming _No, No_, another part of her was studying his features, and more particularly, his way of looking at the bridge of her nose instead of her eyes. She'd nagged him unmercifully about that. "Your ears," she finally said.

"Surgery," he replied, straight-faced. "I was tired of being mistaken for Prince Charles."

"He was afraid of dogs." Nortie'd crossed the street to avoid dogs and he'd barely tolerated cats. He'd been as hopeless around animals as he was clumsy.

The man shifted his weight, changed the positions of his hands on his crutches. "I got over that one. I'd pet her, but I'm somewhat limited in my movements at the moment."

His left leg, she could see, was braced and unbending. "What happened to you?"

"Car crash." _His voice was right._

She felt the earth shifting beneath her feet and wondering whether she, the toughest of the Charpentier offspring, was about to faint. She'd have dismissed the idea out of hand except for that FBI agent back in September, the one who'd asked whether it was possible that her brother was still alive. Someone had kidnapped whozit, the tall skinny lawyer, and the FBI's theory was that he was being punished for prosecuting Nortie.

_If this is Nortie, then he's come to get me at last._ She stared in horror at the man who was so like, and yet so unlike her twin. And still Miss Maggie stood there at the end of her leash, her stubby little excuse for a tail actually wagging!

"I believed him," she managed to whisper. "Jerry, I mean. I believed him; he was so persuasive—"

"Water under the bridge—"

_Oh, yeah, like you're likely to just blow off my helping to put you in prison._ All her regrets came flooding back, regrets she'd only had after he was dead, realizing that her brother had lost everything—his marriage, his business, his reputation, his freedom—at least in part over her lies. _He's going to kill me, or maybe lock me up, what did they say he did to the lawyer? Beat him, right?_ She viscerally recalled her father's scowl when he would open that one drawer, the one where he kept the extension cord, the fury, the hatred in his eyes as he snarled _Strip_, mostly to Nortie, but sometimes to her.

"Sic him, Missy Mags," she said, but fear had leached all the control from her voice. It came out more of a squeak than a command, and she'd never tried to train the puppy for defense. If anything, she'd tried to compensate for the reputation pitbulls had by encouraging her to be sweet and affectionate.

The man—_was it truly Norton?_ She'd always wondered what he would look like if he lost all that weight. She'd presumed that he'd look like Waldo, their father, but he didn't. Nor did he look like the men on their mother's side. No, he looked like Great Uncle Theo, small and slim and scholarly—he smiled down at Miss Maggie and then cast a positively sympathetic gaze on Theresa herself.

"We're fifty today, Tiskers," he said. "I won't bother you again, I promise. But I needed to see you, to tell you that I love you and I forgive you." He smiled sadly and started to turn.

At last she found her voice. "Prove that you're Nortie."

"Can't," he admitted. "I have a new identity and I'm pretty happy in it. I'm certainly not going to do something stupid like offer you DNA or fingerprints. Besides, if I'm alive, what happens to the insurance money? That all has to be paid back, right? And with interest, I'd be willing to bet."

_So Nortie, _she realized_. _

"Tell me what I did for the second-grade talent contest."

He stopped in mid-pivot. "You lip-synched to Theresa Brewer singing 'Sweet Old-Fashioned Girl,'" he said. "You wore a pink dress that you and Aunt Dolly made out of one of Mom's slips."

As she stood there, her mouth hanging open, he completed his turn and began to make his slow hobbling way back down the road. She stood there for what seemed like forever, just watching him.

"Wait!" she finally called. He turned back, one eyebrow raised—_oh God, now that's so Nortie, that arched eyebrow!_—and seemed to sigh. "Come back," she urged. "Oh, never mind, it's easier for me to come there—come on, Mags, let's run!"

She and her dog jogged down the sidewalk until she came even with the man whom she was now sure was her brother. "Come on, it's your birthday, too, right?"

Nortie shrugged slightly. "In another world," he replied sadly. "In another life."

She wanted to ask him, _Do you practice astrology, the dark arts? Did you torture that skinny lawyer from the prosecution team? _She couldn't do it. This was _Nortie_, for pity's sake, her baby brother by four minutes. This was the man who'd wanted to be a_ priest_. The man who as a boy had never once stood up to their monstrous father. The man who'd—in spite of her testimony—remembered her in his goddamned _will_.

"I'll go get my car," she said. "We can go back to my place. The least I can do is offer a dead man a drink. I have some birthday cake, too—there was a party after work."

"My car's just around the corner," he said. "I know where you live."

It should have sounded creepy, but it didn't.

**~ o ~**

Aaron and Jack flew to St. Pete to spend the Thanksgiving holidays with his mother, a luxury that he'd never been able to count on while he was in the BAU—and would again be unable to count on once his recertifications were completed. His mom, ordinarily a stiffly formal woman from one of _those_ families, the Virginians who predated the Mayflower, had become obsessed with hugging him. Every time he turned around, there was Adina, throwing her arms around his waist and squeezing him tight, her face pressed tightly against his chest as though she needed to hear his heart beating, muttering about how glad she was to have her Aaron back safe and sound.

She couldn't let it go. Especially when Aunt Miranda and Uncle Morris were there, she constantly pushed him for details of his captivity, although even his visible scars made her wince and turn away. It was as though she felt it was her duty to cluck and fuss over each pain, each indignity he'd suffered as some kind of psychic compensation for having been unable to protect him from Warden. She was so insistent that eventually Aaron shut himself off in his bedroom and called Eileen, the DC-area therapist Mac Pearson had recommended for him. It was that conversation that alerted him to the possibility that his mother was also trying to make amends for standing by silently years ago, while her husband bullied his sons.

The next time his mother hugged him, he rocked her slowly, gently back and forth. "It's OK, Mom," he murmured in his most soothing tones. "It's OK. I survived. We all survived. We're better and stronger for coming through it, and your love made it possible." Although she had never made explicit reference to his childhood, he must have been on the right track. She burst into heavy sobs of what seemed like relief, and her clinginess diminished noticeably.

There were some awkward moments poolside, since Hotchner preferred to wear a tee shirt even when he swam, but they, too, passed. Saturday morning he removed the shirt and his mother bit her lip once then tried to ignore his scars—which was easier than it might have been since Jack was the star of the show, leaping smoothly and confidently into the water, _"a little fishie, just like his papa,"_ as his mother and Aunt Randi cooed.

Late on Monday night, when he and Jack returned to their Arlington apartment, the first thing he saw when he opened the mailbox was the thick envelope with the tidy block printing. It had been sent to the house first, to the Westbrook Heights address. Even without the decorative return address sticker that bore the Amnesty International logo and the name_ J. G. McAfee,_ with an address in State College, he'd recognized the printing.

Once he and Jack were in the apartment, once Jack was kneeling on the couch and asking his tropical fish if they'd missed him, Aaron sat down beside him with all the mail on his lap, buying himself time by opening a couple bills—they'd be paid electronically anyway—and paging his way through a couple holiday catalogs. Whatever the envelope from State College contained, it didn't feel like a letter. It felt instead like stiff pieces of heavy paper.

He didn't want to open it in Jack's presence. During that one long, intense conversation with his former captor, he'd had a sense of completion, a sense of peace.

Now—two months later—he wondered what on earth might prompt the little guy to write to him. He wondered whether the envelope contained pictures from his captivity—pictures that he'd not been aware were being taken.

_Was I wrong? Is there more cruelty, more vindictiveness in him than I realized?_

"Anything you need to unpack?" he asked his son.

Jack leaned in close to the aquarium—it was a new acquisition since his father came home, and he still found his four vividly colored pets an endless source of fascination. "Gotsa go and unpack," he told the fish, waving solemnly at them. "I'll be back soon."

When the boy was gone, Aaron slid his penknife under the flap of the letter from Warden. From Joe. From Norton. From whatever he really was to Hotchner: captor, criminal, or—or—or whatever the fuck this Joseph Gabriel McAfee entity was.

When the contents fell out on his lap, along with the pale blue Post-It note with the precisely printed words, "_A challenge for both of us,"_ he realized that he'd been holding his breath.

**December: To Men of Good Will**

The man who had once called himself Warden peered past the wipers and through the light spatter of snowflakes falling on his windshield as he pulled into a parking space at the steak house. He was still a meticulous man, intelligent, observant, and orderly. No wild streak of impulsivity darkened his mental makeup. Ordinarily, he was prepared for any contingency—but not tonight.

"Tell me about these people," Genie asked him. "Where do you know them from?"

He hated lying to her, after she'd come back to him, after she'd given him another chance to be an authentic human being, even if he used a name he hadn't been born with.

"I met him in the hospital," he said, reassuring himself that it was mostly true. For specific definitions of _'met.' _"He's an interesting guy," he continued while his heart thudded. "An FBI agent. He has a little boy about Richie's age."

_What if he doesn't show?_

"Did you hear that, Rich?" Genie said, turning toward the back seat.

"Anybody my age?" Tina asked. Josh was too busy being cool to ask any questions.

"Just the one boy," Joe McAfee replied.

He saw them then, surrendering the green minivan to the valet parking. The lawyer, the man whom he'd tracked so carefully, so assiduously, held his umbrella for a youngish woman with a mass of blonde curls—Jessica Brooks, the lawyer's sister-in-law. They were joined by the lawyer's son.

Joe McAfee could barely breathe.

"There they are," he said, and his voice sounded strained to him. "The tall man, the woman in the red wool coat. The boy—his name is Jack."

It was so simple. Dinner. A young people's performance of _The Nutcracker._

The lawyer, himself a careful, observant man, a methodical man, glanced around the drive a couple times, then caught sight of the rebuilt Kia—_Does he realize that this is the car I drove him to the bunker in?_—looked carefully, and waved. Not an exuberant wave. Not even a cheerful wave.

A cautious wave, from one methodical man to another.

"He's kind of cute," Tina opined, "for an old guy."

"He's a real FBI agent?" asked Josh.

"He is indeed," Joe said. "He's a profiler."

"Like on TV?" Josh gasped, momentarily losing track of his _bored-and-too-cool_ persona.

"Exactly like on TV," said Joe, then—wondering whether he was doing something stupid—he added, "He's the guy who got the Boston Reaper."

They pulled up at valet parking, and there was no longer any time left to change his mind, to tear out of the parking lot sputtering excuses at Genie and her kids and retreat to the safe and respectable life he'd been trying to reclaim.

He swung his still-recalcitrant left leg out of the car—he was only ten days out of his cast—and grasped his cane tightly.

The tall and slender dark-haired man greeted him with a nod and an extended hand.

"Can we do this? Really?" Joe blurted at him quickly, quietly, before Genie could wrangle the kids and join him there.

Aaron Hotchner smiled and his grip tightened. "Yeah, I think we can. In fact, I'm sure."

_Finis_


End file.
